I just got out of the PhotoView360 focus group with Marlon Banta, Rob Rodriguez, and Todd Turner. A lot of good ideas were brought up, and I wanted to share just a few of them.
1) Add layers for weathering and damage.
Add a list of checkboxes to the property manager for every appearance, that allows you to add layers like rust, dirt, soot, etc.
2) Fix appearance flipping
Sometimes when you apply a dire tonal appearance (such as wood or brick) the appearance will look correct in the graphics window, but will be upside down and sideways when rendered. SolidWorks really needs to fix this.
3) Transparent appearance performance
Rendering transparency is a serious performance killer. We directed SolidWorks to focus on this when improving they next versions of PV360
4) Fix stubborn appearances
Sometimes, you can’t remove an appearance no matter how hard you try. The only way is to delete all the display states in the model (under the config tab, right-click display states, delete all). This is a serious bug we asked them to fix ASAP.
Dan Herzberg 