Appearance, decal, photoview 360, keyshot.

I wanted my lego man model to look exactly (or similarly) like the real minifigure. So, I used drew my own decals using illustrator, saved as eps file, and then save as jpg file with photoshop. I applied the decals to the model assembly at part level, but could not map it naturally on to the faces but when I tried applying decal on the parts (head and torso) I could map on "face" as I wanted.

I applied the materials and colours and textures to the legoman minifigure and tried to use photoview 360 to create photorealistic renderings. Followed all the steps in the tutorial to edit scenes, add camera, adjust lightings and angles and all that, pressed preview window and then saw black lines on the head and hand. The lines appeared in integrated preview and final render too.

To fix this I tried everything that I could think of: check for lines on image, Google for solutions, using decals provided in learnonline, render with another computer, shrinking the decal image size, re-save another decal file... and everything failed. Stuck with this for 2 days and then I was advised to try using Key shot instead when I was in another class with Hattie.

When I imported the file into Keyshot the decals do not appear. Hattie and Google couldn't help so I applied decal (label) in Keyshot instead.

After 5 hours of self learning and numerous mental breakdown I finally done the 6 renderings. I find the tools in Keyshot more user (or beginner) friendly because I could render the images even without watching any tutorials. But this could be because I learnt Photoview 360 and the tools are similar. Even then, my experience with photoview 360 is so frustrating I doubt that I would use it again. 

I edited textures, scenes, lightings to create the renderings.

Keyshot doesn't allow custom size for the resolutions so I had to save at larger resolution and then crop the images to the required size in Photoshop. Thus, I had to do a lot of try and error with the distance of camera so that the image would look good after cropped. 

failed estimations.

After who knows how many attempt I am happy with the results. Solidworks and Photoview 360 feels like modern day torture device and I'm glad I survived (for now).