Using Drawing Views as Layers for a Cleaner Drawing

by Josh on June 29, 2007 · Comments

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Powered by WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

solidworks tips I want my drawings to be as clear as possible, but I also want the least amount of views and pages to get the information across. This can be difficult when there are parts weaving in and around each other. So, imagine if you could combine two views together to reduce a bunch of extra sheets and views.

Let me explain, by doing the following, you will be able to reduce the number of views and have a cleaner drawing. It involves using two configurations and two views and placing them on top of each other. The main purpose of this it to make some parts stand out from others. Let’s see how to do it.

Here’s the steps:

Create two configurations in your model.
I created one for reference parts, the parts I don’t want to stand out, and one for non-reference parts, the parts I want to stand out.
Put a view of each configuration in the drawing
I saved an isometric view of each that gave me the best orientation and added these two views. Click to Enlarge.

Align the views
Here’s the magic. Right-click on one view and select Alignment, Align Horizontal by Origin. Select the other view to align with. Do that one more time but select Align Vertical by Origin this time. You’ll end up with this. Click to Enlarge.

What else can you do?
Now what is extra, super cool about this is what you can do with the different views. You can change the display of one and get a really nice effect. Or use display states and get something really snazzy looking. Take a look. Click to Enlarge.

This may not be practical for every situation, but if you need to reduce the size of your drawings and bring some clarity to how things work together this may help out a bit. Now, it would just be nice if SolidWorks could add layering as a feature.

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading ...

Comments

Mark

Nevermind! I didn't follow your instructions exactly. I had tried "cross aligning' the views, instead of applying both alignment conditions to the same view. It works now, thanks a lot!!
-Mark

Mark

Thanks for the great tip....it sounds great anyway. I've tried it about a dozen different ways, but I always get stopped on your step3 aligning the views: The first 'align horizontal by origin' works, but then when I try to assign 'align vertical by origin' to the second view, I consistently get the error message "The view cannot be aligned with the selected view because the two are already aligned".

(FYI: I'm using SW2008)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Josh

Hey Brian, I had the same thought of trying an alternate position view, but it was not working the way I needed it to. I use layers in Photoshop and so I tried it out in SolidWorks and have gotten some really cool results! smaller drawings too!

Brian

Very nice tip, Josh!

We could have used this several weeks ago. One of our designers was wanting to do something similar, but couldn't create an Alternate Position view, since it was a part file.