Reverse Engineering from a Picture in SOLIDWORKS

[@lukegiduz]

Great video. Another photography tip: instead of holding the camera close to fill up the frame, stand far back and zoom in. This reduces perspective distortion and gives a closer result to orthographic.

[@HaloWolf102]

I concur with this statement. As you scale up a sphere, the rounded edges become almost linear. So the farther away you are, the less the 'fish-eye leans' distorts your image. There are perspective to orthographic tools inside various image editing software. As well as 3D editing software. If you have one of those, I would check if they have that feature.

[@williamhoward7121]

An easy way to think of this from a photographic standpoint would be using a fisheye lens. It has an extremely curved glass lens which results in extreme distortion. Using a 35 to 50mm Will give you better perspective but as you near the object the curvature of these lenses also will distort. I've never gotten it to work properly but it seems a photocopy image would be the closest to a flat surface but there you run into a tremendous waste of ink to try to make this work. So photo taken with a 50 mm lens at about 2 ft to 3 ft above the image would give you the flattest surface without too much graininess once it's cropped.

[@MrSyNRG]

Also: Scanner! If you can put your object on a scanner it does a pretty good job too.

[@miked877]

One added benefit to this is the reduction of shadowing by the photographer and camera.

[@williamhoward7121]

This is the best video I've been able to find on the internet to explain this process in SolidWorks. Thanks so much for the effort!

[@miked877]

I am still a raw newbie at solidworks but I want to try this. Awesome video without all the fluff, start, stop and flashback that drives me nuts. Very fluid beginning to end, thank you.

[@nameismetatoo4591]

I had to reverse engineer a chassis for an RC car a couple years ago. The shape was pretty difficult to model off of a photo because the curves obscured the edges of the cross-section. I came up with a solution that worked pretty well and made each profile sketch much easier. What I did was I used my green 100mW laser and unfocused it so that it projected a circle of light on the wall a couple feet in diameter. I then placed the chassis so that the side I wanted to project was facing the laser, and I made sure the laser was as normal to the center of the cross-section as possible. I then took photos and measurements of the chassis' projection on the wall, scaling them down to accommodate for beam spread. It may have been an unconventional approach, but it worked. The high contrast of the projected shadow was much much easier to measure. There were some distortions of course, but those were easy to manually fix. For a more robust setup, the laser could be set up much further away from the subject and, by using a collimating lens and a wider beam, could eliminate nearly all distortion in the projection.

[@hawkridgesystems]

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing

[@RubenAvila-p6w]

it would be cool to see that on here. seems interesting

[@muhammadsalah3212]

This tutorial deserves one million likes. Thanks bro

[@YoeyYutch]

Good explanation and use of the scale tool. I'll have to give that a try. One tip I find useful when using sketch pictures is to enable the Freeze Bar for them.

[@derekv2101]

Great video Alexander, keep them coming.

[@HaidarHasani]

very good tutorial, hope to see more like it

[@toroddlnning6806]

you can double click the imported sketch image to rescale it later

[@Rycamcam]

Thanks, great tutorial! Would you upload the pictures of the pedal that you used to trace? It would be super helpful if we could follow along this tutorial using those images

[@ruuman]

Great video, thanks

[@dariusAJM]

Hi all. Awesome Tutorial, however I am having an issue...The scale tool shows up on the drawing but I can't seem to select it and do anything with it. Whenever I try to select the Scale Tool to do anything with it just ends up selecting and moving the whole picture. It's probably something simple where I'll end up in a Homer Simpson "Dohh!!" moment. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[@cet96881]

Thank you!

[@monsterjesse]

that was really good😀

[@yassersaeed827]

great video

[@kandasamyrajan]

In this model analytical tool also gives a good result. Could you explain why spline is used ? I prefer analytical tool because it gives smooth result.

[@fxsrider]

That was pretty kick ass! How long did that actually take?

[@amirdn3952]

THANK YOU SO MUCH

[@GeorgeLenoHolmesJr]

Thank you for the video. The cursor does not change to select the end point of the 'scale tool' line (SW 2019), is there a trick to this? 4:48

[@noznip2008]

Hat off to you Alexander. I enjoyed the video, but the last parts where way to fast to even stop and understand more the underlying operations.

[@BovoM8]

this is a great tutorial but the item im trying to recreate is very tall and my dimensions end up very off

[@AlbatroZzDIY]

Hi that is very good tutorial and i found out that your voice pronounce it at a slow pace and makes me easy to understand as newbie (english is not my native) that is why i subscribe. can you do a favor by post the pictures file you use to reverse engineer so i can also practice using the same pictures. TIA Janssen

[@nvrfollowb5]

what is the command to free rotate the part on plane when scaling?

[@richardcruz1052]

sir in soliddrawing how to reverse in solidworks TIA

[@sharon3420]

Thanks a lot.

[@tazztone]

can't this be done by photogrammetry software? just feed it a bunch of pictures from 360° around the part and it spits out a 3d file?

[@LarrySptz]

Have you do this?

[@garetz2011]

Pictures for raster images must be taken from the longest possible distance, doing so, the difference between hypotenuse and adjacent will be minimal. (I am too old/stupid for solidworks, everytime time I try to use it I end up feeling bad, sad, stupid and miserable).

[@MartinoPolizzi]

I got this problem using this method. When I imported the picture and calibrated it , not all the measurements were the same. So you suggest to shot the pictures from a longer distance than doing a close up to avoid perspective deformation?

[@garetz2011]

@@MartinoPolizzi Yes. It makes sense for me. I compared 25 mm with 14x25 mm. I would love to try a Nikon P900 or P1000 but I can't get one. Some lenses have more or less "barrel effect" and probably the best ones are too expensive.

[@MartinoPolizzi]

Thanks a lot, I just got my phone so I'll try to shoot the picture as far as possible

[@donavanreed5137]

This feature of SolidWorks should only be used for 2D, Perspective is the problem. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME