Large amounts of product information and CAD data is being exchanged between people speaking different languages from different regions, countries and cultures. In order to properly orchestrate these exchanges and ensure protection of intellectual property, regulated collaboration and communication processes have to be put in place.

In order to optimise a companies’ competitiveness its essential that these collaboration processes for new design and engineering technologies also have then to be taken into account and implemented without drastically modifying existing design processes.

Many have experienced the implementation of new engineering processes, which had deep impacts on designers’ activities and required a long and costly transition phase. The ENOVIA Mechanical Designer for CATIA experience from Dassault Systemes provides solutions to define and optimse design collaboration processes between dispersed CATIA V5 design offices, and enables authorised access for other (non-CAD) stakeholders across the company to design data information. ENOVIA helps companies create value by leveraging their existing CATIA V5 design environment, while preparing for the transition from CATIA V5 to CATIA V6 at the optimum time.

Click here for a complete view of information on this whole process.

When creating a composer document using the animation timeline, any movements of the camera, be it zooming or rotating, is recorded on a camera path. By default this path is linear; as a result of this an animation with lots of camera action may seem quite jumpy.

Using the smooth or custom camera path option you can solve this.

Create your animation using the timeline.

In the collaborative actors on the left task pane, click to view the camera/s being used to create the animation.

You will then be able to see you camera when zoomed out from your model.

You then have three options;

Linear (which is taken by default).

Smooth (which automatically creates a transition between movements).

And custom (which adds nodes to the path which enables you to create tangencies around movements or create completely custom paths).

After making these changes, try out your animation to see the changes made.

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

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When moving around a model, attached collaborative actors, which have a constant presence through multiple views or marker sequences in animations, can cause issues by getting in the way. This results in you to have to keep adjusting positioning of each collaborative actor. Time consuming and tedious I think you’ll agree!

An easier way to do this is by using magnet lines. Using magnet lines, multiple collaborative actors can be attached and moved all at once.

Create your collaborative actors in the view.

Using the “Magnet” option on the “Author” tab on the ribbon, draw a line by clicking at the start and end extremities of your desired line.

Drag and drop actors, one by one or by using multi select options (hold ctrl on your keyboard), onto the magnet line.

Multiple magnet lines can be created allowing mass relocation of collaborative actors.

These can be used for any type of collaborative actor, not just call outs as shown.

Hint: After dragging and dropping collaborative actors onto the magnet line, they can be reordered by dragging and placing them in a different order on the line.

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

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Discover more about how 3DVIA Composer can help to  non-technical users to create associative 2D and 3D product deliverables directly from digital product data.

After creating several views, these can be translated over to keys within the animation timeline. Simply drag and drop the view thumbnail onto the timeline at the correct time frame.

This also creates a marker which can allow events on actors or collaborative actors to play from a marker or a marker sequence (from one marker to another).

HINT: you can also work in the complete opposite direction, dragging the time bar on the timeline and capturing a view will also work to create views from an animation.

MORE ADVANCED? For a great overview of how to use assembly groups to break down complex animation movements into simple pieces, watch 3DVIA Composer TV

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

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For this example I created a very basic transform in 3 steps using the animation timeline.

Hint: A useful tool for editing the path is using a 3 viewport style, with a top down and side on view.

Clicking on the actor which the transformation has been carried out on will bring up, in the properties, an animation path style. Swapping this to custom brings up manipulator handles to change the path.

Using the manipulating handles the path can be adjusted to the need; a rotate transform in this case was then added to make the box turn around the corner.

The final result can be seen below

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

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This mode leaves the camera stationary on a point but will always keep the actor you attach the camera to in the centre of screen.

Fly With Mode

This mode creates a fixed camera on an actor and will follow the item whatever transformation is carried out upon it.

For a more advanced demonstration of using multiple camera’s, 3DVIA TV have a great video http://www.3dvia.tv/todcast-5-using-multiple-cameras/ enjoy!

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

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Business analysts suggest numerous ways production costs can be reduced. Three that are often mentioned include the following:

1. Reduce complexity
2. Reduce prototype development time
3. Design with cost efficiencies in mind

1. Reduce complexity

Often product lines develop independently to each other, even though interlinking activities could create sizeable savings both in time and cost for a company. Most businesses find however; that reducing complexity is actually a complex issue in itself.

aPriori has pioneered a unique enterprise cost management software to help companies unlock the potential for optimised design and cost, using information directly from their CAD system.  The cost management platform recognises the geometry of your design and the cost ramifications of the processes that would be required for its manufacture. aPriori incorporates the cost of materials, labour, tooling and more to create a precise assessment of the cost to produce the part or product you’re currently working on.

2. Reduce prototype development time

Time is money; reducing your prototype development time will markedly decrease time to market and in-turn associated cost. Rapid prototyping is now even more important as trends in manufacturing centre around increasing variety, decreasing delivery time and a decreasing product lifetime.

aPriori’s Virtual Production Environments contain both data and logic to understand your business’s physical manufacturing capabilities and compare this against potentially more efficient alternatives. aPriori’s ability to generate cost assessments in seconds (rather than hours, days, or weeks) significantly speeds up the development process, because designers, manufacturing planners, and sourcing professionals never have to wait for cost information.

3. Design with cost efficiencies in mind

Whilst is it important for businesses to get products to market quickly; it is equally important to produce a cost efficient design, to ensure profit margins are kept to a maximum.

aPriori software provides you with an instant cost estimate when you make a change to a design. As a result, you can make more trade-off decisions early in the design process, and drive a significant amount of the cost out of the product.

Implementing each of these concepts independently would require a considerable amount of extra resources; people, time and money. This can all be managed for you with one software platform: aPriori.

aPriori is designed to be used by all employees within the company after very little training; fitting seamlessly in to your business activities and eliminating further resource investment.

The aPriori Product Cost Management Platform is the first software solution to provide manufacturers and product companies with real-time, predictive and precise product cost assessments. With this information at hand you can drive costs out of your products with ease and efficiency.

More information on aPriori can be found on: www.appliedgroup.com/apriori-intro/

Here’s a few of my favourites;

Multi Browser Support

Everyone has their favourite, and now you can use any of them for exporting your 3DVIA document to HTML.

Select Actors Not To Be Published

When exporting to 3DVIA Studio you can now choose what actors to take through and which not to, thus giving the user the ability to hide or completely delete some actors to help maintain their intellectual property.

3D Tool Library

This is a nice one, a new library of tool actors and hand gestures to match to aid in conveying the assembly method of products.

Keyboard Shortcuts

When working with products for several hours, any shortcuts are a bonus, and in 2013x Composer a few new keyboard shortcuts have been added to help you navigate your model.

To see all the new features see the 2013x Fact Sheet

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

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The Rights Manager option gives you the change to apply an expiration date to the document and also pick and choose what content you want to be taken through to the outputted file; such as BOM, the right to save, annotations and more.

The signature option gives you the ability to display author information or even ask the user to agree to a statement, before they can open the file. Disagree? Then tough, you aren’t opening the file!

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

Follow @AppliedCAE

To change this, go to your left pane and click onto the “Collaboration” tab, expand the “Environment” option and click on “Ground”. The properties of the “Ground” will appear and half way down these options you will see “Ground Texture”.

The default entry (which creates the Dassault Systemes logo, if you want to change back at any point) is “%DS%”. To change this to an image of your choice click the entry box and browse for your image, click OK and you will see your image appear as the ground texture.

Hint: you may want to modify your image file to create a white border around your actual image/logo; 3DVIA automatically tiles your image file as you scale this, so to see your image nice and central, simply add a white border.

Also, as the name suggests, the image doesn’t have to be a logo. Try setting this as a ground texture (tarmac/grass/etc.), flick on the “Shadow” option in the ground properties and click to “Set the height on geometry”.

Finally, if you want to make the new image/logo your default for every document opened, you can do this through the “Default Document Properties”. Simply go to File, Properties, Default Document Properties and click on Viewport. On this page you will see the directory of the current image (again, this will more than likely be set to “%DS%”), browse to your image file and click Apply. This image then will be the default for every new document created.

Andrew Acton – Application Engineer

Follow @AppliedCAE