New in SolidWorks 2014 (not mentioned in the What’s New): View rotation angles everywhere (Part 3)

This entry is part 13 of 13 in the series New in SOLIDWORKS 2014

With all the new functionality with view labels in SolidWorks 2014, some ancillary enhancements have also come about as a result from customer feedback during Beta Testing.  One of these enhancements has been the new capability to display any view’s angle within an annotation note.  Why would anyone need something like this?

Well, there are four default options for the display of the angle symbol auxiliary views.

  • Show rotation symbol with rotation angle
  • Show rotation angle
  • Show the text “ROTATION” followed by the rotation angle and direction
  • Show just the angle

If your company chooses to display just the rotation angle (as is common for GOST drawings), it is still sometimes necessary to display the rotation angle.  Because the view label is a global setting within the drawing, there’s no way to accomodate this deviation from the standard settings without having some hugely complicated user interface to track individual labels here and there.  So, instead, one additional annotation tag has been added.  The advantage is that this new tag is available for any drawing view (not just auxiliary and section views).  The new tag is <VIEWANGLE>.  Type this into any annotation note.  As long as that note is a attached to a view, that view’s angle will be shown.  As an example, this new tag can be added to the auxiliary view label after the <VLANGLE> tag (or anywhere else in the note).

View rotation angle in any annotation note

The settings and the result of using the new tag:

Adding the tag to add back the angle

New in SolidWorks 2014: View labels and Auxiliary Views (Part 2)

This entry is part 12 of 13 in the series New in SOLIDWORKS 2014

Auxiliary view functionality has now been expanded to follow several international standards more closely.  When an auxiliary view is created at a nonorthographic angle, the standards specify that the view should be rotated into an orthographic direction.  To account for the change in alignment, ASME and GOST standards specify the addition of a rotation symbol that may also include the actual angle of rotation.  SolidWorks now supports these requirements.

Auxiliary View prior to alignment

To set an auxiliary view to orthographic rotation for the example above:

  1. Right-click on the auxiliary drawing view.
  2. Select Align Drawing View, then Horizontal to Sheet Counterclockwise.
Selection for orthographic rotation of auxiliary drawing view
Select Align Drawing View and rotation direction
.
Rotated auxiliary view to be orthographic to drawing sheet

The view is rotated.  Angle symbol and degrees is added to the view label

If center marks are in the view, they can be rotated by selecting them and entering o (zero) in the Angle group box in their PropertyManager.

The display of the angle can be adjusted in the Document Properties under Tools>Options…>Document Properties>Views>Auxiliary in the Label options area.

View options for angles

These options and capabilities are also available for Section Views with the same instructions as above.

Also, these options are available regardless to standards.  However, GOST standard does has special symbols.  All rotation symbols are also available in the new Views symbol library category.

The next article in this series will cover how to add a view’s angle of rotation to any view type.

Military Precision (Supacat and SolidWorks)

Recently, a DEVELOP3d contributor visited Supacar with an interesting report.  Of note is Supacat’s use of SolidWorks on products, including their Coyote truck.

“For the Coyote truck (6×6) we have the following breakdown: Full vehicle drawing pack – 2,200+ drawings (parts and assemblies) consisting of unique 5,500 parts and assemblies, 18,000 individual parts in the bill of materials,”  explains Dr Jonathan Farley, Supacat’s principal systems engineer.  All of the drawings and assemblies are done in SolidWorks, of which there are 20 seats in-house.

The very detailed article is a facintating read: Military Precision – DEVELOP3D

My.SolidWorks November Update

On the continous road of improvement, My.SolidWorks.com update for November is now available.  Improvements include:

3D ContentCentral on My.SolidWorks3D ContentCentral Integration – Models from 3D ContentCentral are now searchable directly from My.SolidWorks.  Also, previews of models is now improved.

Improved Search – Search now includes SolidWorks Youtube channel.  Searches are now improved to provide more relevant results.

Online Training Manuals – Users who attend training classes can now gain access to online copies of their training manuals.