3DVIA COMPOSER TECHNICAL TIPS

Transcription

1 3DVIA COMPOSER TECHNICAL TIPS 3DMOJO.COM A dedicated 3DVIA Composer Website for additional resources (i.e. Forums, Podcasts, etc.) HARDWARE SETTINGS FOR COMPOSER V6R2011 There are a couple of new settings, as well as some existing settings, in Composer v6r2011 that you should consider activating on your machine. They are all found in the Application Preferences under the Advanced Settings category. HardwareSupport.Advanced (Checked) This ubiquitous setting does various things; however it does activate the new Hatching per Actor functionality in v6r2011. HardwareSupport.AuxBuffer (Cleared) I find that most OpenGL failures are due to this setting being turned on. Thus the first diagnostic that I perform related to graphics is to turn this off! HardwareSupport.MSAA (4 or higher; v6r2011) This new setting activates your graphics card s anti-aliasing capabilities. The value indicates the number of passes to take to refine the anti-aliasing. I have mine set to 4 this is a user s preference just do not leave it at 0 as you will disable the hardware anti-aliasing. HardwareSupport.MSAAOnIdle (4 or higher; v6r2011) This setting goes hand in hand with the last. HardwareSupport.PickingBuffer (Checked) Any new arrow annotation that you create will now be created as 3D OpenGL objects rather than 2D GDI objects. This means that they are in a different buffer than before. If you find that your arrows do not remain selected when selecting them, chances are this flag is the culprit. Application Preferences Viewport Hardware anti-aliasing (v6r2011x) This setting has replaced HardwareSupport.MSAA and HardwareSupport.MSAAOnIdle in v6r2011.) The choice of 4 or 8 or whatever should be user specific.

2 Figure 1. Figure 1. HardwareSupport.MSAA and Hardware Support.MSAAOnIdle depicts versions v6r2011 and prior.

3 Figure 2. FIGURE 2. HARDWARE ANTI-ALIASING DEPICTS V6R2011X AND NEWER.

4 IMPORTING STEP FILES When importing STEP files, be sure to clear the Merge file into one actor per part flag. This is important in that it ensures that the geometry nodes in the assembly tree contain names of the part rather than Object 1, Object 2, etc. Now when it comes time to update the STEP file, the update will have a higher success rate.

5 WORKING WITH THE MAGNETIC LINE 3DVIA Composer v6r2011 introduced the Magnetic Line actor. This actor is a great tool that allows you to align your collaborative actors in a given scene. Unlike the alignment tools of PowerPoint or Word or the like, the Magnetic Line allows you to align items in any direction that you like. There are a couple of key points that you need to be aware of when using this new tool. The magnetic line is available only while authoring content. It is not available when working with published content. Published content in this case would be High Res images, Animations or viewing in 3DVIA Composer Player. Think of this tool simply as an alignment tool when authoring content. The Auto alignment property of the collaborative actor must be set to either Free 2D or Free 3D. This allows the tool to move the actor as you like. The magnetic line is a collaborative actor. Once you have created a magnetic line it is now available in other views as well. You can reuse the actor by simply showing it from the Collaboration tree. Magnetic lines are not available for animation. You cannot animate the magnetic line to move the location of actors during the course of an animation. However you can use set the positions of actors with the magnetic line. The key will be to use the Set Location Key command for each of the actors on the magnetic line at each of the time points that you are moving the actors. RENDERING ENHANCEMENTS LEVERAGING YOUR OPENGL CARD S CAPABILITIES Much like the evolution of the SolidWorks graphics engine, 3DVIA Composer v6r2011x now leverages more of the capabilities that are available in today s OpenGL cards. You ll find features such as: Ambient occlusion Shadowing on the model takes into account the lighting to give a more realistic image Per-pixel lighting Also known as Phong shading. This allows you to simplify the model and still receive nicely rendered smooth image Depth of field This form of rendering allows you to create blurred geometry as the geometry goes out of the focal region of the camera

6 HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGE ALPHA CHANNEL OPTION In the High Resolution Image workshop, you will find a new Alpha channel option. When it is turned on, the background will be set on the alpha channel of the output image (if the file format supports alpha channels). This means that the background of the image will be transparent when you place the image in your InDesign or Word document. You will now be able to overlay images to get additional effects. One cool side effect of this new alpha channel support is that if you have a component in the assembly that is semi-opaque, then this level of opacity is taken into account in the rendered image. The example is if your model is a car with tinted windows, then you will be able to see through those windows with the shading taken into account. TECHNICAL ILLUSTRATION EPS SUPPORT With the release of 3DVIA Composer v6r2011x, a new file format is available when working with the Technical Illustration workshop. This is EPS. By supporting the EPS file format you will now be able to directly include the line art images created by the Technical Illustration workshop into InDesign or Word documents. TIPS BOM TABLE To set up BOM IDs that are similar to SolidWorks, you will want to first select all of the parts. o Open the Select dialog and select Parent level 1 and Add to the current selection as such: o o This will select all of the sub-assemblies that are one level above the selected parts. In the BOM task pane, be sure to clear the Skip characters from right and turn on the Ignore numerical suffix

7 o This will have Composer drop the component instance number from the Actor.Name. To be sure it will leave the dash, but will at least give us better control. I will then add the appropriate meta property columns to show the actual Part Numbers or relevant identifiers. INSTANCE NAMES IN SOLIDWORKS ASSEMBLIES: The Import instance names option on the [Default] Document Properties (see Figure 3) Input page now applies to SolidWorks assemblies. Previously, SolidWorks instance names were always imported irrespective of this setting. When disabled, 3DVIA Composer imports subassembly/part component names instead of instance names, which might be useful to more easily group actors for BOM generation. CAUTION: When this option is disabled (the default), imported SolidWorks instances have different names than in previous 3DVIA Composer versions, which impacts the Update command. When updating a document created by a previous 3DVIA Composer version, enable Import instance names.

8 Figure 3.