DISQUS

Great tips! This stuff can be a real pain sometimes. Once I had such a mess on my hands I literally took screen shots of the ACAD file, patched them together in Photoshop and scaled the image to the proper size to use as a trace guide within SolidWorks. The problem was that all the segments were cut into tiny straight lines--almost none of which truly touched one another. Inserted the image into my sketch, started a new sketch and created "real" geometry I could use.

I really like that quick speed in getting something set up. The gloss reflections are also great. Very interesting.

Many of my "real" renderings in PhotoWorks now take only a short time, too. Fast processors and a library of custom materials/scenery make the rendering process much more drag-and-drop for awesome effects. But wow, getting to that stage is such a pain with the defaults PhotoWorks starts from (speaking as a SW 2007 user, anyway). You'd think they'd have some great tweaked materials in the default library by now, but I find them quite limited. If they'd solve those basic issues, perhaps PhotoWorks would no longer be seen as such a pain to work with.

Nice! I just had the lost references happen (again) to me yesterday, so this will be great. By the way, the work-around I use in the meantime that helps with reference stability is to break the operation into two stages. First, use the Split feature to create separate bodies. Then, use the Save Bodies feature to save your bodies as parts. I don't know why, but I've had much better results with this method.

Like Chris above, we've stuck with 2007 and skipped 2008 entirely. Your previews of 2009 have offered great insights for this new release, which we intend to run.