SOLIDWORKS Tutorial - Creating Custom 3D Textures for SOLIDWORKS Using Blender

SOLIDWORKS offers lots of options for formatting notes to meet customer’s needs.  In this quick video we show customers how to add borders to note numbers in a list.  This provides the ability to flag important notes and highlight them on the drawing.  One issue for SOLIDWORKS Inspection customers is that when borders are used around notes it prevent those notes from getting extracted as characteristics.  This video shows a method for placing borders around list numbers so that SOLIDWORKS Inspection will be able to identify those notes.This covers how to design and generate greyscale heightmap images from SOLIDWORKS models using Blender to process an STL of the SOLIDWORKS model into an image that can then be used as a custom texture in other parts. This process takes advantage of the 3D Texture ability which can turn images used as textures on the surface of a part into actual modelled features. The final model can then itself be exported as a 3D-printable solid model useful for prototyping and other custom applications or modified further using Boolean operations as a Mesh Body. This process gets around the difficulties surrounding having to parametrically design a texture on the analytic and nonanalytic surfaces of a part using traditional SOLIDWORKS features and patterns that would often have difficulty rebuilding at different sizes and adhering to organic surfaces.