Category Technical illustration

It’s here, just in time for the holidays… Santa has visited us early and stuffed our software stockings with another impressive release of 3DVIA Composer, full of breakthrough technology and fun-to-use features. You could shake the box and try to guess what’s inside… or take the easy way and watch the preview for more info.

My personal favorite new feature is Smart Outlines. What’s yours?

Enjoy!

Have you ever wanted to make a technical illustration using non-black silhouette outlines for specific parts? It’s incredibly easy and fast to do, as Tod demonstrates in this latest TodCast.

This announcement was posted a few days ago:

“Un Techo Para Mi Pais,” (UTPMP), recognized by the United Nations as one of the non-governmental organizations best suited for public-private partnerships, gives disadvantaged families a new start by offering the security found in a new home,  along with the social, educational and micro-financing services needed to create a responsive community or “barrio” where they can thrive.

But like many volunteer organizations, UTPMP faces the challenge of how best to train new volunteers while capturing the lessons learned by others leaving the organization.  To do this, UTPMP is creating a real-time and online 3D community for sharing and retaining organizational knowledge.

3DVIA Composer to the rescue! This sort of remote training is ideall...

We have a TON of new videos to share with you. I was about to post our next “3DVIA your iPod” video, and quickly eclipse our 100th video, and the title itself struck me… we’ve been doing this for several years, and when we originally started, this was the era of the video iPod. And the way to get the video on your iPod was through iTunes podcast feed.

A lot has changed in the last few years. We’re in the YouTube era, social era… iPhones and iPads, Android, tablets… it’s easier than ever to share videos. We don’t need iTunes video feeds or any other complicated uploading/downloading procedures and syncing. So while I was hoping to soon mark our 100th video “podcast”, it’s time to get current and refresh the name. Plus, I’d like to introduce you to our producer of these videos: Tod.

With th...

Hello everyone!

Here’s a great new intro video created by the team @ SolidWorks. Let us know what you think!

This customer story was released on the solidworks.com website a couple of days ago. It’s about DLP Ltd., a UK-based company that specializes in manufacturing “barrier-free and low level access shower bases and specialist shower doors, enhancing independence, well-being and quality of life,” under the trade name AKW.

Along with using SolidWorks for their design, they are using 3DVIA Composer to more quickly create technical illustrations for installation manuals that get delivered around the world. How much more quickly? How about an 80% time savings! Pretty impressive!

According to DLP Technical Author Paul Smith:

3DVIA Composer allows us to export high quality technical line drawings for producing detailed installation instructions...

SolidSmack blogger and Desktop Engineering contributor, Josh Mings, took 3DVIA Composer for a test drive and has written about it in the latest issue of Desktop Engineering online.

For three days between November 5th and 7th, 2008, Technical Communication was the center of attention at the Rhein-Main-Hallen in Wiesbaden. 3DVIA was there, and it was a big success for us at this year’s tcworld conference.

Wie jedes Jahr in Herbst war Wiesbaden mit der  Tekom Jahrestagung für drei Tage DAS Forum für Technische Kommunikation. Vom 5.-7. November 2008 hatten weit über 3000 Besucher die Möglichkeit, sich mit den neusten Trends in Sachen Dokumentation vertraut zu machen.

Taira Promote, a customer in Japan, is making great use of 3DVIA products to liberate 3D data out of engineering and into the hands of technical publications and training manuals. They are using 3DVIA Virtools and 3DVIA Composer to develop and launch their “i-manuals”. These are in-depth , interactive, and on-line technical manuals to communicate and simulate highly complicated concepts.

You can view the press release here.

In these economic times, imagine what a 25 to 40% documentation process reduction could mean to the competitiveness of your company.

Take a look at what Acqualux, a UK based company, has been able to achieve with 3DVIA Composer. The full press release can be viewed here. The following is a notable highlight from this announcement:

“We have to provide layman-level instructions to the end customer as well as detailed instructions for our service and quality control people so they can walk consumers through the build when they don’t understand something,” said Aqualux Design Manager Neil Harrison. “3DVIA Composer was a huge leap forward for us in producing documentation...

In Markus’ third installment, watch how he creates interactive 2D documents by using the linking ability in 3DVIA Composer. We know that not every use case can utilize interactive 3D documents. Many times you still need traditional 2D output, and you can see how easy it is with 3DVIA Composer to create hotspots in the output so that you can create a series of wonderfully connected 2D technical illustrations.

Thanks Markus, this is a great tip!

Recently, I received some user comments to several blog posts. Normally I strive for non-censorsed, authentic content. Unfortunately, this user insisted on making personal attacks at me as well as other rude comments that do not bear repetition.

Among the fluff, this user did manage to articulate a point, and here is the text:

All I read about is how everyone else is terrible and Seemage is great, but I don’t hear discussions about business value that you guys have delivered. You should really start taking the high road, as I know Seemage is a decent product but this kind of lame, baseless contempt for the competition is becoming a standing joke amongst my peers. For those of us looking to buy Seemage, it would help if I didn’t have to explain to my executives why your blog always sounds like you guys have your backs against the wall….Help a brother out!

So to “help the brother out”, here is a recent email that I received from a customer, explaining why 3DVIA Composer (aka Seemage), is great:

Still very ...

This week, Tod continues to build out his technical illustration that he started last week. He covers several options for ballooning the illustration, and then outputs the view to line art format.

Watch closely as he performs the following:

• Sets up the default balloon widthC
• Creates Bill Of Material id’s for different levels of the assembly
• Creates BOM id’s using part names and meta properties
• Controls the how the balloons are aligned
• Quickly changes the styling of the balloons
• Updates a view with his changes
• Outputs the view to an interactive line art (CGM4 or SVG) while controlling the desired line weights of outlines, silhouettes, and shadows

It takes Tod less then 5 minutes to cover these topics and generate a fully interactive technical illustration...

Have you ever spent hours to create a complicated exploded view, with thrust lines and callouts, only to have to re-do it when engineering makes a change on you?

This week, Tod Cruikshank shows us how to quickly create exploded views for technical illustrations. While in animation mode, he uses an innovative set of 3DVIA Composer functions to complete his demonstration. In particular he:

• uses “associative paths” to create jagged thrust lines in one easy step;
• uses a combination of assembly motion and part motion to create those thrust lines;
• moves one part in an assembly, and then quickly applies that placement to other selected parts;
• creates convenient hot keys to further increase the pace of his work.

When I first saw this technique, I was blown away at how fast these illustrations c...

Newsflash: 3DVIA Composer has been added to the breakout session grid at COE!

Chris Williams, the General Manager of 3DVIA Enterprise, will host an in-depth session titled Revolutionizing Design Communication: Creating Product Information with 3DVIA Composer. This presentation and discussion will begin on Tuesday, April 29 at 4:30 pm, as part of the “COE Briefing Center #1” track, in the Australia 3 room. This news is so late-breaking that the COE website has not yet been updated with this information.

 

It had been a long standing assumption of mine that anybody threatened by new technology would dig in their heels and fight for the status quo. In the case of 3DVIA Composer, I had believed that our ability to rapidly generate rich content would threaten the traditional technical writer.

I will not belabor the point any further… instead I bring you the voice of David Lance, an experienced technical writer who was recently introduced to 3DVIA Composer. (Full disclosure: David is a tech writer for SolidWorks.)

I sup...

 

This blog post got me thinking about the way that technical illustrations have evolved over the past few years, from the days of airbrushing and photography to a new digital era of creating illustrations on a computer. It also got me thinking about a January 2008 article in Intercom magazine, entitled “Three-Dimensional Illustration for Technical Communicators” which has this to say about the evolution of technical illustrations from flat 2D images into robust 3D images:

“You don’t need to be a skilled illustrator to create effective 3-D graphics. Three-dimensional illustration allows the technical communicator to respond quickly to project changes and create imagery appropriate for most publications or multimedia...

Many people are familiar with this illusion of the “old lady, young lady” image. This old/new paradigm seems to be all the rage lately. On American television, we witness countless new reality shows featuring celebrities from the 80s and 90s, desperately trying to find new fame. While sometimes entertaining, there is also an embarrassing undertone to the shows, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

It’s very similar to how PTC is reviving old Itedo Isodraw references and massaging them into wonderfully new Abortext Isodraw references. These retreads from the past, pure 2D technical illustration references, are being re-framed and re-branded as great new references that are fully leveraging 3D in new and innovative ways...

We have said this many times: visualization is not enough; viewing 3D geometry does not add any value to anybody, whatsoever!

That may sound like a provocative statement, but this humorous anecdote from clientcopia.com is a great example that not only is visualization not enough, it can be downright confusing.

Humor aside, it is not enough to simply look at a model on the screen, you need to learn something about that model. That model needs to tell you a story. So what matters most is context. When you can add additional product information to support the geometry, and can convey what should be done with that part and the ones around it, then you can tell a story and you can provide real value...

 

You’ve heard us rant about the exceptional qualities of 3DVIA Composer, and how we make better reuse of CAD data than other competitive products such as Isodraw. I’ve shown 3DVIA Composer to people hundreds of times, and I never grow tired of the look of amazement on peoples’ faces when they see what we can do. But what really amazes me is how quickly our customers can go from purchasing our product to being productive and generating positive returns: it’s a tribute to our architecture and ease of use.

It’s why we win benchmark after benchmark, why customers continually choose 3DVIA Composer over other products, and why customers actually turn off those products in favor of 3DVIA Composer.

But don’t take it from me… take it directly from one of our newest customers, Miller Formless...

When a smaller company is acquired by a larger one, one of the questions people ask (and one you hear most often from the press and analysts) is, “Will the passion surrounding the acquired product get diluted as the technology is integrated into the acquirer’s operations?”

It’s a fair question because we have all seen that happen with great technologies before: lots of traction in the marketplace leads to an acquisition after which the technology disappears.

That’s not about to happen to Seemage. I offer two data points to make my case.

First, FISHER/UNITECH announced a partnership yesterday with Seemage and is in the vanguard of SolidWorks partners who are literally clamoring to begin delivering the world’s most advanced system for product documentation to their customers...

It’s been a very fulfilling and exciting 24 hours for everyone in Seemage since our acquisition by Dassault was announced.

First, I want to give a shout-out and thank-you to some of the more authentic bloggers in the community, people like Robin Capper (post here), Chris Kelley (here) and Josh Mings (here), for noting our big news and for encouraging us to continue the blog. We will.

We wouldn’t be true-to-form, however, if we didn’t have a response to the “traditional” CAD press, as expressed in their blog posts on the acquisition (Ralph Grabowski’s comment here and Randall Newton’s here).

Trust me, we don’t give a whit for Autodesk’s “tags” (whatever that’s supposed to be)...

It is with great pleasure that we announce today that Seemage has been acquired by Dassault Systèmes. The complete press release can be downloaded using the link below.

Last week, I watched a replay of Right Hemisphere’s recent webinar and then, for comparison, I watched the replay of our most recent webinar.

You couldn’t find a more different approach in the way the companies choose to present themselves and their technology. Our competitor chose to present an hour of discussion on the future of PLM. We chose to present our product in a live demonstration, using real customer data, in what we believe is a real-life example of typical problems people face creating rich product documentation.

I am astonished that in the 56 minutes of Right Hemisphere’s webinar they showed no product demo at all. By contrast, we begin to demonstrate Seemage as quickly as possible...