Reflection - Siemens NX Tutorial

- [Instructor] So you've gone through the trouble of creating highly stylized surfaces, and you wanna verify that those surfaces look good. Now, one of the best ways to do that is analyzing things with reflections. Under the analysis tab, you have what's called face shape, reflection, and what this does for you is it allows you to pick the surfaces you wanna analyze, and it's going to cast various types of reflection on that surface. I'm a big fan of going down to ultra fine here, but you may have a standard or fine or extra fine, but ultra fine gives you the nicest, cleanest looking lines or images across that surface. Now, if you don't have a powerful enough video card, you may need to turn it down a little bit, but go with the ultra fine. I can determine the number of lines, the orientation, the thickness of the lines, so I get a really good indication of the quality of that surface. You can see here everything looks really nice. You'll also notice across the boundary, right? I have a face blend that's in this area. Let me go over to colored lines and select okay. Now you can see I have a nice sharp change of light right over here. It's really just sharp comin' across. If I change my face blend, and I'm gonna go to a tangent symmetric. Let me change my center radius a bit make it a little bit smaller, so that way I have a little acceleration coming in. You'll see the change in the way the reflection moves across that surface. I'm gonna Control + Z and Control + Y, one is undo and redo, so you can see the difference. So I'll undo that and redo that. So one's really sharp. This is the original, that's just a simple round blend, and the other one has a little bit of lead into the next surface, so it's a little gentler. So that's what I mean by creating a high quality reflection or a high quality condition across that boundary. It'll also allow you to verify that you have nice clean edges from one to the other with adjacent surfaces. So for example, let me go ahead and show this surface, and I'm gonna go back into reflection. I'm gonna pick that surface, and you'll notice across that boundary it runs straight across. If I modify this through curves, come in here, this is the initial face it's constrained to, I'm just gonna change this down to G zero, and you can see the difference. Because it's no longer tangent, there's a break in the light the way it moves across the surface, so if there's a hard corner, it's gonna show it. Again, so if we were looking at the exterior of a car, interior, maybe it's an aircraft, aero smoothness is critical, you wanna make sure that the boundaries as you go across one surface to the next are nice and smooth. I'm just gonna cancel out, so it'll return to the original state that it was in. I'll go back into the reflection, and another way I like to look at my parts is with scene images. Probably my two favorite are what's called simulated horizon as well as spherical horizon. This just gives you a nice, really crisp reflection across that surface, so you can walk it across and make sure everything looks nice. The same thing with my spherical horizon. You can analyze it in many different ways. You have all these other images as well, spherical rooms, spherical light. You know, some people like to use different tools. Again, my personal preferences are the spherical horizon as well as the simulated horizon. I'm gonna select okay, and at this point, it puts an analysis tab here in my part navigator. You'll notice that I have my reflection analysis. I can turn that off here if I want to. I can hide that. If I change my display, simply if I long-press my right mouse button and just, let's say, swing straight up, and I go shaded with edges, you'll see it just returns back to its normal shaded condition, so if you wanna see that again, you just turn it on and right mouse click and swing down and you go right to the face analysis, and it takes you right back to that face analysis. So this just allows you to turn it on and off when you're in that face analysis. You may have other face analysis, different areas of the vehicle turned on, so that's why it allows you to analyze just little regions, right? You can put as many of these as you want, turn 'em all on, turn some on, turn some off, however you wanna do it. That's about it. The reflection tool's a really good tool, get comfortable with it. It really helps you make very stylized, high quality surfaces.