Liquid Cooling Render Gallery

[Metric]

INTRO

In this tutorial I'll be using Solidworks 2009 for modeling, Rhino 4.0 for scene setup and Maxwell Render 1.7.1 for the rendering. Maxwell Render is supported by numerous software packages (Solidworks, Rhino, Google Sketchup, Cinema 4D, etc. A list can be found on the Maxwell Render site, http://www.maxwellrender.com).

Each software group follows the same rules when applying Maxwell Materials (.mxm files). I'll be using Rhino as my scene setup software and the process in which materials are applied should be nearly the same for Solidworks, Sketchup and so forth.

TUTORIAL RESOURCES

HDRI Lighting Environments: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2028/Tutorial/hdri.zip

Maxwell Materials: To be added!

Maxwell Render Website: http://www.maxwellrender.com

Maxwell Render Material Gallery: http://mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com/

Maxwell Solidworks Help Guide: http://www.maxwellrender.com/manual/...help/index.htm

McMaster-Carr: http://www.mcmaster.com

THE DESIGN

In nearly all of my watercooling block designs, they are physically correct in dimensions and scale. For this tutorial, I'll show the making of the 680i MOSFET waterblock posted earlier in this thread.

Taking the MOSFET heatsink off of my dead 680i board, I went and measured the mounting dimensions with my digital calipers (These can be found at Home Depot/Lowes/Etc for around $25.00-$35.00 USD).









I also measured the length and the height required to clear the R50 chokes (68mm and 7mm respectively)

After taking these measurements, I start sketching out the base in Solidworks.



Note that the height of the base (11.75mm) is less than the standard diameter of a G1/4 tap (11.8mm) and necessary O-Ring groove, so an "adapter" will be needed to have any fittings work. This is where the mid-section and top designs come into play.





Each section (base, mid and top) and complementing O-Rings are then put together into an Assembly file. The Bitspower Shining Silver barbs are made by evil-98 on Xtreme Systems and I still need to see if I have permission to post the .SLDPRT file (will be under the resources section once I can). Hex cap models and dimensions can also be downloaded at McMaster-Carr: http://www.mcmaster.com/.



RENDERING THE SCENE

After finishing up the MOSFET block in Solidworks, I setup a simple studio setup in Rhino (Solidworks users will have to create an assembly with each piece (floor, lights, etc) and work from there)





MATERIALS, LIGHTING AND CAMERA SETTINGS

Materials are simply applied by adding them to the current Scene Manager from the Materials Library. They are then applied by selecting the desired objects and right-clicking on the wanted material in the Scene Manager and selecting "Apply to Selected Objects". A ZIP file of some starting materials (Copper, Acetal/Delrin, Acrylic, etc) will be added at the beginning of this tutorial later this week.

LIGHTING

Unless you are dealing with a very large scene (working in meters, not millimeters), the supplied HDRI environments will work just fine (Reflections can become blocky/pixelated if the HDRI isn't a high enough resolution for the scene). HDRI's can be applied under the Environment box in Maxwell Studio or the equivalent software plugin window. For the camera, settings such as ISO Speed, F-Stop can be used to control the DOF. For the provided HDRIs, the camera's EV should be set to 9 (Default is 13).

RENDERING

After tweaking with the camera settings, the final step is to render. After clicking the Render button/menu item in your software's Maxwell plugin, a command window should briefly popup and then Maxwell Render should start up and begin rendering your scene.



Each SL or Sampling Level doubles in duration (i.e. If SL 1.0 takes 3 seconds, SL 2.0 would take 6 seconds, SL 3.0 would take 12 seconds, etc). As the SL increase, noise is also halved. A good quality-to-noise ratio is usually achieved after a SL of 14. The time is obviously dependent on the materials used and the complexity of the scene. To reach a SL of at least 14 can take anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour on my system (Vista 64, 3.6GHz Q6600, 4GB DDR2-800).

CONCLUSION

Hope this tutorial helped shed some light on how to work with Solidworks and render using Maxwell Render. If you have any questions or found an error, feel free to email/PM me.