Where have the lights gone?

I was recently asked by a customer who had upgraded to SolidWorks 2011 where had the Scene, lights & camera folder had gone, so I thought it would be worth repeating this on the Solidtec blog. In previous releases of SolidWorks the Scene, lights and camera folder was a hidden tree item that could be made visible by going to your system options, FeatureManager and selecting show for the S, L & C folder. The folder could then be seen on the feature manager design tree sitting below the annotation folder at the top of the tree.

So I hear you ask where is it now? A great enhancement with 2011 is they made decals available to all the SolidWorks packages and in doing so have made an extra tab on your feature manager which is called the Display Manager and has the coloured sphere icon. This tab now contains a film camera icon which I have highlighted in the attached picture which gives you access to Scenes, Lights and Cameras.

If you have never used the Scene, Lights & Camera folder I would highly recommend taking 5 minutes to see what adding a camera can do to capture great product shots. Please don't settle for a grey model with a standard isometric view as with very little effort this tab that is now available to all in 2011 can very quickly turn a grey blob into an engaging photo realistic image.

I think this type of query also reinforces the benefits of having a support contract as the customer had very little downtime as in 1 phone call to Solidtec support his question was answered and he was able to continue working.

Happy modeling.