Some time back I asked a similar question and posted similar pics and was asked "why would you want something like that when you can get a photographic rendering?"
There must be a demand for it because SW introduced a "rough draft" appearance in 09. It may not be exactly what you are asking for, but it looks like it is heading in that direction.
I haven't tried the pre-release of 09, but you can see the rough draft appearance on p. 23 of the "what's new":
I downloaded the "free trial", installed it, but it is asking for a license, I sent the email to them but haven't received anything back yet. Anyone get the trial to work?
I sent a license request and I got this from 3DVIA.Composer.Support@3DS.com:
Hello Sir,
Unfortunately, the person in charge of generating manually a license file when such an issue happens is currently in vacation.
She will be back on Monday.
I will forward her this email.
The 3DVia Composer is available from the Solidworks customer portal download, but I noticed PhotoView 360 is available for download also.
Will PhotoView 360 work with SW 2008 or do you need 2009 for it to work? It's a 400 MB download and I don't want to eat up the bandwidth if it won't work with 08.
How much is that Autodesk Impression program? I was looking for the ability to do this type of shading when I did patent drawings with SolidWorks but could not find an easy or cost-effective solution.
PhotoView 360 is directly tied to your SW 2009 license. Without 2009 installed you can install PV360 but it won't run. You'll recieve a license eror and it will close. It will open model files in a format other than SW 2009.
I think this is worth it if it really does what it says. I wish I would have found this when I was doing patent drawings. It would have made them look so much better.
![[cheers]](/data/assets/smilies/cheers.gif "[cheers] [cheers]")
