Creating photorealistic images with CAD software has never been so easy as it is today. Four, five years ago it took at least half an hour of lights adjustment, shadow placement and texture selection to get a decent image of any CAD model that you wanted to present. But now everything is so much easier that one might even say the line between a designer and an engineer is getting finer and finer.
In the past few years I have mainly been using Solid Edge for modeling and rendering, however, for the last three months I've given a go with SolidWorks 2010 and I must say that the rendering tools have come a long way. For an engineer who wants to show his model in a more realistic way, yet doesn't want to spend all afternoon on it the PhotoView 360 is a perfect tool. Select the background, choose the materials and lighting and voila, you are all set. This image here took me about 4 minutes to create. Concidering that I have used PhotoView only 5-6 times this is not bad at all.
Rendered images look so much better than simple screenshots, so I will definitely try to use these in the future when uploading files to the library.
Just plan to upgrade your computer every now and then as the new rendering tools will definitely use 120 percent and more of the available capacity...
