Visualize is not just a program you use to make your products look photorealistic or create amazing animations. It can also be used to create amazing effects to your company’s logo! I’ll show you this technique in a few easy steps:
- Get a PNG of your company’s logo.
- Import it into an online PNG to DXF converter (I like to use https://convertio.co/png-dxf). The better the quality of your PNG, the better the quality of your DXF.
- Bring that DXF into SOLIDWORKS as sketch entities. This will also give you a chance to get the logo perfect using normal SOLIDWORKS sketch techniques.
- Now we give a thickness to our logo so that we have the geometry we need to work with in Visualize.
- Import it into Visualize. I like to use “Retain Structure” for the part grouping. This will make all the surfaces in the logo be selectable individually. (It’ll save time when it comes to adding the appearances)
- Once it’s imported, we need to create a wall. This is going to allow us to reflect the appearance onto the wall behind the logo. Go to Project > Model > New Model > Wall.
- Scale that wall up so it covers the entire logo and with ample space all around. (This is so we don’t see the edges in the final render). Move the logo so that it’s just in front of the wall.
- Now lift your logo up into the air so you cannot see the ground in the final render camera. This one is optional. We do this so we don’t have any of the ground reflections slipping through.
- Now we can start adding the appearances. Choose what type of light you want on your logo and add it to the backside faces.
- Turn on “Accurate” mode so you can see how it’s going to turn out. If it doesn’t look quite right, play around with the settings (brightness, color, etc.).
- Render it!
So that is how you create an awesome backlit effect onto logos and any other type of text you need.
We discuss a lot of these cool and useful tips & tricks in our Visualize course. Our training will take your renders to the next level!
Date: 14/04/2022