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Smack me Sideways. The Complete iPhone. Modeled in SolidWorks, Rendered With Hypershot [Download]

by Josh on June 17, 2009 · View Comments

I hope you all are ready for a fun and enlightening experience. I know we’ve pushed this iPhone modeling in SolidWorks clear around the table, but this is the model that everyone is and will be looking at for the foreseeable future.

Nelson Au was kind enough to share his model and his process for getting the absolute smoothest surface work possible on an iPhone model within SolidWorks. Believe me, you don’t want to miss downloading this and looking through the features.

Not only did he get get near perfection on the back surface, he modeled the face and all the tiny buttons your fingers love to fiddle with. He then cranked out some renderings using PhotoView 360 Hypershot. Here’s the process, the model and what it looked like when he was done. Thanks Nelson.

How it happened
I asked Nelson to give a little insight to why he went about modeling the iPhone. It’s no simple task, but thanks to some excellent guidance from Mark Biasotti and some good ol’ experience, Nelson turned out the best looking SolidWorks iPhone model I’ve seen. Here’s what he had to say.

I did see that Josh had posted his take on the phone and Mark Biasotti had also shown how he would do the phone! That got me to try it too.

At first, I wanted to see if I could do the iPhone’s corners as one Boundary surface. I quickly found that it can be done, but I could not control it to my satisfaction and I found the surface at the sharp corner end to be slightly distorted.

My process to building the phone is very much the same as how Mark showed earlier on this blog. But I chose to break the surfaces at the same locations they are shown broken on the Apple PDF 2D drawings we downloaded from Apple’s developer page.

Download the article and step overview [iPhone-Nelson-Au.pdf (217kb)]

Download the iPhone Model [iPhone2.SLDPRT.zip (4.94MB)]

Agree? Nelson did an INCREDIBLE job modeling the iPhone in SolidWorks. He also turned out some brilliant rendering using Hypershot. Psssst! If you like these, just wait till you see the capabilities coming out in PhotoView 360 2010… (shhhh!! using Nelson’s iPhone model. Absolutely AMAZING.)

Tagged as: Design Process, iphone model, solidworks s

  • Punchbot
    awesome work, very nice
  • WILLIAM
    w ! o ! w
  • cal418
    Hello!

    I can't read the downloaded file with my my SW2007 version.

    Is there a solution?
  • Hey cal, it's because it's a 2009 file. unfortunately there's now way to save it as an earlier version. If there's a way for you to get 2009 go for it man. This is a great example.
  • Ryan
    Any chance of getting the model in a SW 2007 part file?
  • Ooo, no backwards compatibility. I'll save it out as a parasolid and .iges and step, but will be next week. sorry bout that.
  • Nelson
    Thanks for the comments guys!

    Thanks Kevin, great to hear from you! Appreciate your comments!

    ecirwin- thanks for the criticism! It's good to hear this kind of feedback. It allows me and others to learn and improve. I'll likely revisit this model and I'll take your comments to heart.
  • Hi Josh,

    It is impossible for me to keep up with the incredible amount of improvements and innovations in the newest and badest SolidWorks releases. Plus all of you expert users do such outstanding work with the program I am always in awe when I see your work. I might not ever be able to do what I see the other writers do but all of you are my constant inspiration. This I-Phone thing is spectacular. What is an I-Phone? (giving away my age here) :)
  • ecirwin
    First off, very good job on this model and the rendering is amazing. Nice work.

    Just a small amount of constructive criticism. The surfaces are only as good as the curves. I have done a little browsing through those curves and one thing caught my eye. In the feature "Topview ctr curve" you have 2 straight lines and a spline that forms the corner. You then used the Fit Spline tool. The spline was not curvature continuous with the straight lines, so you end up with some curvature inflection in the sections that used to be straight. This ends up bleeding through in the corner surface. I tried to create this sketch so that it did not inflect and found that I had to add an intermediate point to the spline to get a similar shape once the curvature control was added.

    Again, very well done. If you don't know already, someone will always find something you could improve on. Just one of those things to look out for.
  • Kevin Quigley
    Great model and process Nelson, looking forward to seeing more from you in the future! (Nelson is well known to all the Cobalt users as the rendering guru :-))
  • Mahike
    HyperShot will always kick ass
  • Amen.
  • Nelson
    awa64- The renderings of the iPhone were done in Hypershot 1.8, as you can see Josh fixed that. My mistake for not making that clearer to Josh.

    I do plan to try PhotoView 360.

    To answer your question, the clear area on the iPhone top is Glass. And I set it up with default settings, but checked the box for "double sided".

    The iPhone LCD is a block that would be the LCD component inside the model. I first assigned a plastic material for that. Then I used the map function and applied the LCD artwork I created to the block. (The LCD artwork is a PNG file created with Photoshop that I placed in the Textures folder for Hypershot) The plastic material has some reflective qualities, the LCD artwork will reflect that too. So it didn't look very good. I edited the plastic material to be Flat. That did it and the LCD artwork rendered as you see above.

    Hope that helps!
  • It's a shiny box.... Not impressed ;)
  • awa64
    Something that I've been trying to figure out for a while now... how do you get a LCD screen on a piece of consumer electronics to render so clearly and with a degree of luminance to it like that? How does the geometry have to be set up to accommodate it, and what kind of material trickery is required?

    I'm using Hypershot as my main rendering suite at the moment, so Hypershot-specific information would be great, but even generalized information would be helpful. And, of course, I could always crack open PhotoView 360 and give that a try, too...
  • Hi awa64 - contact us here @ Bunkspeed or visit our forum. We'd be more than happy to help you out with any questions you may have.

    E-mail support@bunkspeed.com.
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