Design boards: Exploded views

I mentioned in the previous blog that I wanted to add some exploded views to my design boards to clearly showcase my components.

I copy and pasted the existing designs on sketchUp:

First, I had to select everything and right click on it. Then, I selected 'explode' to separate each planar surface from the other. 

Once the planar surfaces were separated, I started selecting one face at a time and using the 'move' tool to drag it approximately 10cm away from its designated position.

I repeated this process with all elements in the design including screws and hinges. I wanted to keep everything at a similar position to show the assembly of my products.

I used the same exact approach to each of my product and these were the results:

However, last term, I displayed my exploded views as screenshots from the design process as shown above. I thought that it did not look professional as they were not renders.

Therefore, I decided to further enhance and improve the quality of this terms project and use renders to also showcase my exploded views. I downloaded an app called Irender_nXt and then set each render to take up 7 minutes for the highest quality possible.

I think these turned out great and very professional. I cannot wait to add them to my design boards and then my website.

The process of rendering was really time consuming and difficult as I had many obstacles along the way, however, I managed to take plenty of useful shots.