Watch out! She's going to explode!

Don’t worry! I’m only creating exploded views of assemblies! Creating an exploded view of an assembly can be very useful when providing information on how to put all the parts of a product together. It can be animated in SW, or inserted in a drawing document, together with a list of parts or bill of materials. The procedure to create an exploded view of an assembly isn’t really complicated. In a nutshell, you just click on the components and drag them to the desired location, but I’ve found that merely dragging the parts often doesn’t produce the results I expected, especially in assemblies that have components that have been placed on an angle, rather than along a horizontal or vertical axis. The Essentials manual suggested a solution by dragging and dropping the Triad (that is used to drag the components when creating an exploded view) to a different location in the same component.  I found out that I could also align the Triad to the components origin, and that it works like magic, particularly when the components have been mated with a concentric mate between them. This also results in straight and smooth exploded sketch lines between the components that have been dragged this way. I created a small video to illustrate all this, since I think it’s easier to show it than it is to write about it. I promise you this video is much clearer than the last one, but if you have any trouble seeing it as it appears here, you can always download the WMV file. Download ExplodedView.wmv

Comments

[Ben Eadie]

Wow! Great work Gabi...
I know I will be waiting until your next episode. Keep up the great work!

Ben

[Gabi]

Thanks, Ben! But I'm afraid I need some advice from you. Putting videos up is harder than I thought. They look OK when I first publish them to my computer, but once I upload them to some hosting site and they convert them, they don't look all that good. I've tried many places and I still don't get it right! What's your secret to great-looking videos? I need a little help here!

[Ben]

Ok, No problem I have another person asking me for this advice as well. Give me a couple of days and I will put something together. I will then ask if I can post these on my site to get some more content there in exchange if that is ok. If not I will still show you :)

[Gabi]

Thank you, Ben! I don't mind if you want to put them in your site. Thanks for taking the time! I'll be waiting!

[fcsuper]

Gabi, once you get this figured out, you might be able to start an iTunes podcast, or at least set up a series of vidoes on youtube.

[Gabi]

Matt, the irony of it is that I was merely trying to find a way to simplify my work, and so I thought that putting a video would be easier than writing about it, but it turned out to be soooo complicated! Would be nice to figure it out. I don't know if I would have the time (or the know-how) to make a series, but at least to make a nice, good quality video every now and then would be neat.