You may have noticed I’ve been gone for a bit. I’ve taken a new role as a SolidWorks Composer TTM.  This episode I’ve decided to revisit using Selection sets and Filters to help organize and edit your animations. Remember, naming selections in proper order can be a very powerful asset when editing your animation.

Enjoy,

Goat

For most of you this is a refresher on one of the capabilities within 3DVIA Composer Authoring. When animating repetitive tasks it is helpful to utilize the “Copy Selected Tracks of the Selected Actors” from the context menu in the timeline. In this example I am applying a rotation to a single bolt and then copying those tracks to the rest of the bolts in the assembly. Here is the link to the video describing this fundamental process.

Tim

There have been many requests for an instruction on how to build a configurator application. Actually, it’s not so difficult to build such an application if you have good understandings of views in Composer and some knowledge of HTML coding.

Here is a procedure you can follow. In this tutorial, we just use the GotoView() method, which can be used without Player Pro license.

Those who are already familiar with Composer’s intelligent views and HTML coding quite well can directly jump to the discussion of actual coding section at the bottom of this page.

0. Create Views

You might want to review our previous podcasts such as this and this in order to create intelligent views that can partially save and update selected properties of specified actors in Composer. In this tutorial, we access inte...

Composer has many useful functions to help your authoring processes faster and more enjoyable.

The first function I would like to introduce is “Select Instances” that can select all the same geometry referenced in several positions of the model.

With this function, you can select multiple instances with just one click.

Then, select Transform > Multiple Gizmos and Local Transform.

Multiple Gizmos will display the axis arrows for each part selected in the previous operation.

This will visualize the direction of the possible part movements. Please note that the green arrows are directing outward for each tire.

When you drag one of the green arrows, you can see that each part is moving to the direction indicated by the arrows...

Discover how to shorten production, minimize overhead and surpass your competition by creating modern assembly instructions with 3DVIA Composer.

Share with us how 3DVIA Composer has helped you in your daily missions !

Sammy

I literally just got off a web-ex with a customer that wanted to mirror a procedure to make let’s say a left hand/right version. I never did one of these before and thought I’d try it. When I figured out how easy it was I just had to share it with you guys.

Enjoy

Tod

Recently I got a question of how to specify a specific angle on a polyline and get accurate measurements of angles. Here are a couple of tips and suggestions to do that. Also, of you have not checked out Tim’s Podcast of detail view of a detail view, check it out. It’s a very powerful way to get just what you need. http://www.3dmojo.com/2013/08/23/detail-view-of-a-detail-view/

Tod

       In the last post (“Benefits of Fully shattered conversions”) we discovered that Composer FullyShattered mode was basically the best way to handle large data assemblies. Let’s discover here some tips & tricks to handle such large data .

To handle large data, 3 main axis have to be taken in account: The conversion part, the Application Preference settings and the rendering options.

Conversion:

There are 2 ways of converting into Composer format:

        1. Conversion through 3DVIA Composer authoring tool

It’s better to convert original CAD files, such as .CATProduct or .CATPart files, rather than .igs, .stp, .cgr or .3dxml files.

Composer best optimizes geometry translations for original CAD files.  Already converted files such as ...

Don’t forget about Custom Rendering. 

Win friends, influence people, look like a big time illustrator, whatever reason you can think of, custom rendering in 3DVIA Composer is easy and a powerful way to highlight specific parts and produce cool illustrations.

If you have not tried it yet, you should.

Enjoy Custom rendering,

Goat

For those in the community who are also designers, Dassault Systemes has a new contest entitled “MOVEin3D – A 3D Print Oriented Design Contest.”  You can win an iPad mini!!  All you have to do is  submit an original 3D creation that includes at least several mechanically independent, but not separable, parts.   Real, original, funny, or mind-struggling creations are preferred.  Your object must be 3D-printable and meet the requirements of today’s 3D printers.

To learn more go here:  http://www.3dvia.com/madein3d

Check it out, and let me know if you win!

Dominick D. Gallegos

Hello, my name is Tod, author of the “world renowned” TodCast’s on the blog. You may have seen me on the Forum as user Goatshrink. Long story but let’s just say it was once a massacre of my last name and it kinda stuck.
I’ve been a visual communicator forever, graduating from UW stout with an industrial design degree in 1982. Of course I was only two at the time that makes me in my 30’s still, right? I guess I’m trying to stay young by doing things like the Tough Mudder Challenge. This last one did not quite go as expected.

Aside from my weekend warrior excursions I’ve been a long time animator and Pixar wannabe. I love communicating through animation...

This post is a bit different from most as it relates directly to a recent experience in putting together a swing set for my children over the weekend.  This project started out with much excitement and even more of a commitment to get this project finished well before the cold winter weather comes to the Northeast.  Considering I have a background with 3DVIA Composer, I was confident that my predisposition led me to think that the directions for this swing set would be logical and well-planned…. as you can imagine probably it was disappointing and even more frustrating the further we got into this project...

Recently a customer told me he wanted to be able to turn off all selection and highlighting including the red bounding box but still see only specific objects  clearly .so I showed him how to do it.  I thought to myself, this would be a handy little tip for a TodCast so here it is.

Enjoy

Tod

The Silhouette rendering mode of Composer is a great way to present 3D models as if they were 2D drawings, which is beneficial for people who are in transition from 2D to 3D.

However, there are some limitations for this black and white rendering mode.

We often see our users struggling with some parts sticking to their original colors even in the Silhouette mode.

In such a case, the parts may have the Opacity values less than 255, and we can easily fix this issue by adjusting the Opacity value to be 255.

After the change, we can now see the desired rendering.

The other issue typically reported is that, when a cross-section plane is activated, the Silhouette mode suddenly turns to the Smooth rendering mode.

The solution is to change the Emission to be 1...

This is my favorite feature in Composer! I use it every single time I am in the product, it saves massive amounts of time when modifying and updating my views.

Let me know if you agree!

Enjoy! Garth

Your illustration customer has a very specific style for their Detail View bubbles. Here are some techniques to match those styles. Lets get creative!

Tim

3DVIA Composer gets lots of use in different kinds of manufacturing organizations, but the basic value of having clear and concise work instructions can benefit other industries.  For instance, In the AEC industry worker safety is a top concern.  Construction is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world incurring more occupational fatalities in both the United States and European Union than any other sector.  Of course, there are obvious safety concerns if you assemble an airplane or automobile incorrectly, but most assembly workers are seldom at risk and problems are likely to be found in QA and testing, well before the plane has passengers...

Today I’d like to show you how you can present your 3DVIA Composer content combined with images, videos, documents and other supporting materials in a mobile setting using your iPad or iPhone and a 3DVIA Spotlight. This post is a quick look at the workflow for publishing your 3DVIA Composer files to 3DVIA.com, adding supporting materials and then creating a mobile 3DVIA Spotlight presentation.

3DVIA.com is an online storage spot for your 3DVIA Composer content published  as 3DVIA.com model files. You then add your supporting files to the 3DVIA.com models. The 3DVIA Spotlight you create contains the 3DVIA.com model files you choose and allows you to present your content wherever you have a WiFi connection. Many questions about 3DVIA.com can be answered by viewing the FAQ.

The extensive e...

When creating technical illustrations with 3DVIA Composer a frequently asked question is how to show a drawing frame with title block in the generated vector outputs.

With the Model Browser it’s easy to create a library of drawing frames including the necessary text fields. The video shows how to create a standard A4 drawing frame with text fields and how to use it from the model browser for technical illustrations.

As usual for 2D drawings you’ll need one template for each paper size (paper space) you’re using. But have a look at the video… it won’t take more than 5 minutes for each.

Enjoy… and just ignore the German title block

Jochem

In this post I want to address a technological issue related to the use of the relatively old ActiveX technology together with newer technologies provided by Microsoft that do not natively support plugins such as ActiveX controls.

History

In the past, Microsoft provided us with Windows Forms for developing user interfaces for Windows – these were pretty straight forward visual elements that could be placed upon a surface by drag and drop. So, for instance a button or a list box could be placed on the form and resized to meet the developer’s requirements. These were fairly static elements that were pre-defined, even though the user had some control over colors and size, etc...

3DVIA Composer has 2 main conversion types available: Monolythic mode and FullyShattered mode. So what is the difference between these 2 formats type? What is the best methodology when facing large data conversions? Let’s try to discover that out.

Let’s first start with some definitions:

Monolythic files are actually archive file (a .zip file) containing the structure and its associated authoring features such as labels, arrows, views, properties, animations etc… It is one single file.

FullyShattered mode represents an exploded structure. It is a 3DVIA Composer product with multiple .smgXml and .smgGeom files. SmgXML can also point to .smgSce (e.g animations) + .smgView (e.g. views). These animations and views are available for all using this smgXML

Fully-shattered assemblies hav...