Photoview 360 Render Window Not Launching Properly

Photoview 360 is a rendering tool used by Solidworks to render photo-realistic images of Solidworks models. Photoview 360 uses a user defined scene, model appearance, decals, and lighting to create its render.

When performing a render of a model, Photoview 360 will generally open a window similar to the one below:

The render window visually and graphically shows the progress of the photo render in real time and should be open and visible at all times during the render.

If your render window is hanging or opening and immediately closing with no render being completed, this is most likely an error with your Bonjour service. Bonjour is a prerequisite for Photoview 360’s operation and if Bonjour is missing or crashing, Photoview 360 will also crash and behave erratically. To fix errors with Bonjour, we’ll have to uninstall and reinstall the service.

To begin the process, we start by checking to make sure that Bonjour is currently active on our machine. To do this, open up your control panel and navigate to the Administrative Tools and click on “Services”.

Once you’ve opened up the services windows, look for the “Bonjour Service” entry and check to make sure that the “Startup Type” is not set to disabled.

If it is disabled, turn to “Automatic” or “Manual” and test the issue again. Disabling Bonjour can cause this behavior as well. If Bonjour is already set to “Automatic” or “Manual”, then Bonjour will have to be uninstalled and reinstalled. (NOTE, YOU WILL NEED THE SOLIDWORKS INSTALLATION FILES FOR THE REINSTALL).

To uninstall Bonjour, we simply go to the control panel and uninstall “Bonjour”:

After you’ve uninstalled Bonjour, you’ll need the Solidworks installation files to reinstall the correct version of the service. The installation files can be either downloaded files or a disc that you used to install your software. If you do not have any installation files on hand, contact your VAR to receive download links for the correct version Solidworks.

Once you’ve accessed your installation files, look for a folder named “Prereqs” and after that, a subfolder named “Bonjour”:

Once there, double click on Bonjour64.msi in order to reinstall Bonjour. After the installation process, test the issue again and the render window should now show correctly.

If the issue continues to persist, please check your graphics card and graphics card driver version. Using an unsupported graphics card or an out of date graphics card driver can cause this issue as well. To check your graphics card driver version, simply navigate to the Solidworks Rx Tool under Start -> All Programs -> Solidworks 20XX -> Solidworks Tools -> Solidworks Rx 20XX -> Diagnostics. Check to make sure that you have a supported driver. If not, please use this article here to update your driver: Performing a Clean nVidia Graphics Card Driver Update/Rollback. 

If the issue still persists after updating your graphics driver, please contact Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support at 877-266-4469