Discover a little known tip to help you clearly show internal components of an assembly through the outer level components using SOLIDWORKS Composer...
Quite recently I've been involved with creating content for
customer demonstrations of SOLIDWORKS Composer, a product you can find more
info about on our website, http://www.solidsolutions.co.uk/solidworks/Technical-Communication/Packages/Composer.aspx
This has involved taking a customer’s CAD data and
replicating their Technical documentation process using SOLIDWORKS Composer,
showing them how much quicker and more efficient they could be.
A number of the data sets I've come across
then have involved enclosures and one of the requirement was to clearly show
the internal components. What I thought
may be useful then is to use this blog to show how this could be done using the
standard technique and how I would enhance the image using a little known
technique.
To protect the customer content I've used one of our
standard demo models and I wish to show the internal parts inside the casing, my
first step would be to get the viewpoint correctly setup and very easily
capture the view,
Next, the default method would be to select the casing
geometry and choose to reduce the opacity in the property pane,
and give me the effect shown below…
Nice and simple…however the parts inside appear are still
hidden a little by the casing. Therefore
to make the internals more prominent I chose a slightly different technique. Taking the view above as my starting point I
switched the model into ‘custom render’ mode, this gives the user complete
control over the render display of each and every component,
Then
(and this is the little known tip) I was able to promote the level of the
internal components to make them appear to sit above the casing parts, using
the ‘custom rendering’ ‘priority’ settings in the properties pane when a
component is selected. This is a great
little feature to either promote or demote each component above or below other
items, it’s works in a similar way to typical Microsoft tools like Word and
PowerPoint where you can ‘send to back’ or ‘bring to front’
The result below now shows the parts and quite importantly
its edges sitting above the level of transparent casing parts,
Hope it helps!
By Russell Richardson
Elite Applications
Engineer