Decal case study - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

In this video, we'll take a look at a few examples of how decals can be used in the designs, and how and where they can be placed. To get started let's open up 5.1 assembly, which is the TI WD1-20. And you can see that it's open on the screen right now. And you can see, we've made some improvements from the last time we opened the file. I've added some decals around the top bezel, on the the back side and on the hour marks, and a logo here in the center, as a well as the edge. We've added quite a few decals to kind of spruce up this design. Over here on the left, you can see on the details view, I can see all the decals that have been added to this design. And some of them have multiple decals. To get started, let's take a look at this first one here. Notice these are the tick marks around the top bezel here, and notice that it's not a flat surface. If I zoom in here, you can see it's actually a cone shaped surface, and that's okay. So let's take a look at that decal, right-click on it. I'll say Edit decal, here's the path to the decal we're actually using, which is a regular PNG file, and the mapping of this. I've got a projection set up on the ZX plane. And that's really important because of which plane that decal would be placed on. If I change that for instance to YZ for instance, maybe we, it's not going to show up at all because it's projecting from a different plane. So you've got to make sure you're choosing the correct plane of how it's going to be projected onto the surface. And then these values here, the horizontal and vertical location we'll center that up. So, we want to make sure we're at zero and zero. So, that's one way to use decals, and that's using the projection method. We could also do the Illumination, okay? The next one here is going to be the decals on this back face. And if I actually open that part, you can see the decals are actually on that level. So this part if you remember before, was actually a wooden piece, but I'm going to actually throw a decal right on top of that to make it a more carbon fiber look. And the decals here are stacked, so you've got a carbon fiber background within a logo put on top of there. Now if I right-click on either one of those things, I can move that decal up or down. If I move it down, you won't see it because the decal for the logo is actually below the carbon fiber. So you wouldn't want to do that. But if you did, you could hide the carbon fiber and then you hide the logo on the wood. So you are a lot of different choices of how you want to show your decals, and how you want to use them. And if you go back and show the decal and I go back and I move that decal up, it shows up and looks good. (SOUND) Close that. The next decal is this one over here, on the edge. I'm going to open that part and take a look at that decal. So the decal here shows up under decals, and this time I'm using actually a, I open it up. I'm using a JPEG image, it actually has a background to it. So, I want to mask out that background. So I have is a reverse image of the background, which is the vector mask file. And anything that's in black will be masked out. So this is a white background with red logo, and I've got this image mask that's going to go on anything in black, that's going to get rid of white off this. That's how you do that, and we'll again do that in the next few movies. Go ahead and close the back down (NOISE). Click on Save. And those are our main decals looking at. The last one I want to point out is this one here. I open that part there. You can see that I've actually added this mother-of-pearl image on top of this little inlay piece. Adds a really nice texture to the final rendering, and it's pretty easy to do. All we did is go over to the Render panel. Go over to Decals and my MotherOfPearls on there, and at the decal. And notice here, the decal is actually much bigger than the piece, and that's okay. You can extend a decal past the edge of the part, and I will just make sure it covers that entire top surface. If I were to grab one of these corners, you can see that it's just a movable image I can drag across. And I can scale to the right size, and I could also move it around if I needed to, by grabbing some of these arrows. Once you've got a place and scaled it correctly, you're happy with it. As long as it extends past the edge, you don't need to do any kind of masking. And click OK. (NOISE) Now we have the images, all placed on the surfaces, all the decals already, now ready for a final render. Let's go up to Render, click OK. Decals are extremely handy and allow the designer to add branding textures and overlay graphics, this is normally one of the final steps in a product design that add that final touch. However, don't stop there, decals have many uses and can be great in the preliminary design stages as well.