SolidWorks - Rhino workflow questions

[MoRender]

Hi,

Firstly I'd like to say how happy I am with the results coming out of OctaneRender, I have previously been using KeyShot and really appreciate the differences.

I've downloaded the Demo and played around with it and I'm hoping to buy the Beta soon but I just wanted to know how people are braking up the models into different materials - KeyShot takes the materials from SW natively so I'm using Rhino at the moment to create the OBJs from SW. In SW I export via STEP (which gives me a clean model) or IGES (preserves SW materials but has some artifacts when I bring it into Rhino), is there are better file type to save from SW?

Exporting to OBJ from Rhino - when I export an imported IGES each face needs to be assigned a material in OctaneRender - if I export from a STEP each Object has a material but I can't pick out faces (as I'm planing to render other peoples SW models I have little control over how they model them) Any advice on the best way to export from Rhino would be great.

Additionally to any staff I teach SW and some Rendering at a Uni in Australia and would like to know if you are planing on selling Education Lab Packs in the future.

Thanks

[acc24ex]

Well I did use this small software MoI 3d, from one of the Rhino developers, you can assign layers there, which are just RGb colors and you can export to .obj - however sometimes the .obj gets scrambled and I export it to fbx and load inside c4d or 3dmax (where you can set uvw and textures maps) and then run a octane plugin which converts it to a clean .obj.. the MoI 3d is a great little app it can convert from a lot of those solid models to poly models, and it has one of the cleanest topologies when exported (and you can set the amount of polys you want to use / in realtime, I think this is the only software that does that I've seen so far)

[pixelrush]

Hi, I've just finished a macro to export in one step from SW to Octane. SW has poor UV unwrap though so its best to go through some other app if you have items where that's important. I use Blender.
There are very few SW users here and still fewer interested in an exporter so I will be putting it on the main SolidWorks forum as a free .obj exporter instead.
You can follow it up there in a few days if you want.