In the last post (“Benefits of Fully shattered conversions”) we discovered that Composer FullyShattered mode was basically the best way to handle large data assemblies. Let’s discover here some tips & tricks to handle such large data .

To handle large data, 3 main axis have to be taken in account: The conversion part, the Application Preference settings and the rendering options.

Conversion:

There are 2 ways of converting into Composer format:

        1. Conversion through 3DVIA Composer authoring tool

It’s better to convert original CAD files, such as .CATProduct or .CATPart files, rather than .igs, .stp, .cgr or .3dxml files.

Composer best optimizes geometry translations for original CAD files.  Already converted files such as .igs,  or pre-tessellated data such as .cgr may be compressed, but you cannot expect so much.

        2. Conversion using Enterprise Sync

Conversions failing on Composer may turn out to be successful in Enterprise Sync, especially on a 32-bit platform.  This is because the memory space available for the 32-bit platform is very constrained, Composer’s UI memory footprint actually reduces the available memory size for conversions.

In both cases, some settings may also be adapted

• Repair/Refinement: For large models, lowering the quality can effectively improve the performance

• Project: Enabling “Visible actors only” can load parts and assemblies that are set to be visible

Application Preference

        1. Profile and Viewport
Choose appropriate profile according to your hardware. For Intel onboard graphics cards, use “Safe.

        2. Disable high quality rendering parameters

Disable “Per-pixel lighting”, “Shadows”, “Ambient occlusion”, “Depth of field”, and “Hardware anti-aliasing”

        3. Selection

Disable Highlighting, Tooltip, and Show hidden edges

These settings may turn off mouse over interactivities but are effective to increase performance for large data.

Settings for rendering performances

        1. Turn on “Back culling”

Click on the background > Properties > Back culling

        2. Turn off Ground, Shadow, Mirror, and Grid

Ribbons > Render > Ground

        3. Turn off Capping for cross-sectioning plane

Select a cross-sectioning plane > Properties > Capping > Show

Recently I got a question of how to specify a specific angle on a polyline and get accurate measurements of angles. Here are a couple of tips and suggestions to do that. Also, of you have not checked out Tim’s Podcast of detail view of a detail view, check it out. It’s a very powerful way to get just what you need. http://www.3dmojo.com/2013/08/23/detail-view-of-a-detail-view/

Tod

You probably noticed some changes when you got to 3DMOJO.

New logo and colors, whats up? You might say, “but I’m not a CATIA user.”  Not to worry, its all good 3DVIA Composer is now called CATIA Composer.  This is an exciting development which promises to be help for all Composer users.

CATIA is Dassault Systèmes’ pioneer brand. It is the world’s leading solution for product design and innovation. As Composer is professional content authoring software for the communication of engineering data, it makes sense to bring it into the CATIA family.

This transition allows us to access the latest CAD technologies, ensuring CATIA Composer is up to date with current versions and features of CATIA, while maintaining the openness that made 3DVIA Composer such a powerful communication tool, regardless of CAD software used.

Your existing maintenance and support is not affected.

This is the first step towards more exciting developments in the future. We look forward to bringing you even more cutting-edge technology to help advance your technical communication challenges with effective and exciting 3d experiences.

Still working on the website but you can download CATIA Composer even though It may still say 3DVIA Composer

Hello,

Here is just a few possible use cases for CATIA Composer showing some nice examples in Sales and Marketing, Quality Assessment, Customer Support and Services, Manuals and Technical Documentation, and Engineering and Manufacturing using imported PMI from CATIA.

BTW,  We are still looking for customer demo videos, possible tips or any other Composer skills you would like to highlight. One Customer has just submitted one and I’ll be posting it soon.

Come on, lets see what you got, show off your skills impress your co-workers.

Goat

This is the first customer video from one of our 3Dmojo users, Azhar Qazi.  Azar is a Mechanical Engineer  from India working for Precihole Machine Tools. He works in design and development of Air rifles as well as Deep Hole Drilling machines. As an additional activity he also creates content for marketing like rendered images, Composer animation, brochures, posters, and website activities. Self-taught in Composer, Azhar has been using Composer since 2012. You can check out some of his additional work at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW859cUgrU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTsqBGicNM

All the maintenance videos are linked through a QR code that is pasted on the respective machine part. So the customer just needs to SCAN the code and can see the maintenance videos on his smartphone. Precihole showcased this feature at IMTS 2014, Chicago.

Azhar also used other features of Composer like creating a (draft) configurator for their air rifle models, Creating Multilingual BOM’s, Posters and also spare part lists (http://preciholesports.com/SX100_spare_part_list.svg)

Precihole even uses animation to convey their Machine designs to the customers.

I hope you enjoy the video  done entirely in Composer with audio added in a third party software and encourage all of you to submit your tips and techniques or just let us highlight some of your best Composer work.  I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you. Again you can email me at editor@3dmojo.com

Goat

Styles are a very powerful and probably an under-utilized feature that can really help make your Composer experiences more consistent. In one example from the forum, a user was adding spaces to text panels to make them the same size. I see users all the time that will make a new panel and change the color, position and size over and over again and manually   move them around to the same position. When I show them how to do this with styles usually the first comment is “I wish I would have found this a long time ago”

So here you go, today’s Quick Tip – Use Styles for consistency.

Just thought I’d add a little note. If you do want to add spaces and keep them, use the Character map tool for spaces in Windows and create the style with that. Its a great way to save formatted indents.

Goat