Email LinkVISUALIZATION TOOLS
(or, How to See Your Designs in All Sorts of Useful Ways)
by Benny Foreman & Bruce Sumpter
Editor’s note: Our engineers here at RL Hudson use Pro/ENGINEER® solid modeling software to design parts, and we know that many of our customers’ engineering departments also rely on Pro/E®, which is, after all, the standard by which all other modeling programs are judged. With that in mind, we at Solutions have enlisted two Pro/E experts – Benny Foreman and Bruce Sumpter – to share some design insights with our readers. Both Benny and Bruce served as application engineers and independent consultants for PTC (the company that developed Pro/E) prior to joining our engineering department here at RL Hudson.
Benny Foreman graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1995 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering. Since then, he has split his time between working as a manufacturing engineer and as an application e ngineer designing manufacturing software. Benny has been part of RL Hudson’s engineering team since 2003.Bruce Sumpter earned a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Oklahoma State University in 1985. He now has two decades of experience working with engineering and enterprise-level software solutions. Bruce joined RL Hudson’s engineering team in 2004.
Gentlemen, take it away…
VIEW OPTIONS: You can display an assembly
in a variety of ways, including
a regular
(complete)
view, as shown on top above. A
cross-sectioned
view (middle) allows you to
see inside the design.
An exploded view
(bottom) helps show the relative
arrangement
of the assembly components.
Benny: Let’s talk about the visualization tools built into Pro/E. There are a number of them, all designed to help you see what’s going on within a single part, or to see the interaction between different components of an assembly.
Bruce: An obvious example is the cross-section tool, which slices through your model, letting you see inside.
Benny: These visualization tools can help you highlight what we like to call “potential redesign opportunities” (formerly known as “problems”).
Bruce: They can also help you communicate your design to other people.
Let’s say you’re in the conceptual stage but need to get
customer feedback; creating a JPEG image showing a part in cross-section
can facilitate that discussion.
Benny: A picture really is worth a thousand words!
Bruce: In the past, the various visualization tools were accessed from a number of different places within Pro/E, but the most recent versions of the program have most of the tools collected under the View menu. Click on this menu and you’ll see several submenus, including: Display Settings, View Manager, and Color & Appearance. We’ll be discussing these three today.
Benny: So let’s start with the most widely used visualization tool: Cross-Section. To access cross-sectioning, select the View menu, go to View Manager, and select the “Xsec” tab. There are three different types of cross-sections available: planar, offset, or pattern.
Bruce: Planar cross-sections allow you to select a datum plane to cut through, removing everything in front of or behind the cut. Using a datum plane in the center of a part or assembly is standard practice in order to see internal features. Whereas planar cross-sections involve straight slices, offset cross-sections allow you to sketch a non-linear cutting shape, typically referencing features within the design (such as holes) you might want to expose. Pattern cross-sections are like repeated planar sections seen all at once, like the loft curves in an airplane’s wing.
Benny: Or like with an MRI, where you can specify the gap between each section.
Bruce: Absolutely. That’s a great analogy.
Benny: Now, the next visualization tool is related in a way to cross-sectioning. It’s called Dynamic Clipping, and you get to it by going to the View menu, then Display Settings, then Visibilities. Dynamic clipping is basically like pushing a cross-section through the part via a slider bar. But the really neat thing is, you can rotate the part while you do this! It’s very free-form, and great for diagnostic purposes.
Bruce: Also like an MRI! Only better, because you can rotate “the patient.”
Benny: And they don’t complain…much.
Bruce: Uh-huh. The third visualization tool we should talk about is View Style, which you access by going to the View menu, then the View Manager submenu. View style allows you to select how various components of an assembly appear. You can choose from five options: wire frame, hidden line, no hidden, shaded, or blank (invisible).Benny: This is entirely a mix-and-match process, meaning you can ask Pro/E to display one part of an assembly shaded, and another part in hidden line view. You can set it up however you want.
Bruce: And once you have it just right, blow it up! Pro/E includes a very cool Explode View tool you can select under the View menu. This tool does just what it sounds like: it explodes the assembly apart. You can then adjust the locations and separation distances between the components.
Benny: Or, if you prefer, some parts of the assembly can be exploded out and others left intact. The explode view tool allows you to create the types of drawings used in assembly instructions for pretty much any toy or build-it-yourself piece of furniture you care to name.
Bruce: Here’s a tip: Before creating an exploded view, orient the assembly as desired first, typically in an isometric orientation. Then, create the exploded view without ever rotating the view. Zoom in/out and pan all you want while adjusting the component locations, but rotating the view should be avoided. When you’re done creating the exploded view, store it as a saved view and name it something like “EXPLODE1.” You can then quickly access this exploded view from the Saved View List as well as use it on a drawing.
Benny: Now when you’re not exploding your assemblies apart, you can, under the View menu, adjust their Color and Appearance. You can set the color of individual surfaces, whole parts, or entire assemblies, and combinations thereof.
Bruce: For a more detailed effect, you can even designate a base color and a highlight color!
Benny: As for appearance, you can adjust the level of transparency, making a part or assembly more or less opaque. You can also set the amount of reflectivity, making the surfaces matte or mirrored.
Bruce: And you can apply textures, like wood grain or brushed nickel, though be careful with this if you don’t want your design to look like it belongs in a 1970s-era wood-paneled office!
Benny: You can even import images into Pro/E from other graphics programs. These images can be applied to the surface of a part.
Bruce: I sometimes color features to highlight changes on a design. For example, if I’ve added a new rounded edge, I might draw attention to it by making it a different color. This helps greatly when sending a JPEG to a customer to communicate a change.
Benny: Everyone has their own personal preferences on how to use color, but I like to designate certain colors for specific materials. For example, I tend to model rubber parts in green, plastic parts in orange, and metal parts in charcoal. But there’s no right or wrong way, of course. Personally, I don’t like using red or yellow, mainly because highlighting for selections shows in red in Pro/E, and text and other detailing shows in yellow.
Bruce: The last visualization tool we should mention has less to do with a part’s appearance and more to do with how parts of an assembly go together. In other words, whether (or how much) they touch. Pro/E offers Interference Checking to show this. You can initiate interference checking by pulling down the Analysis menu, then the Model Analysis submenu, then Global Interference, and then by selecting compute.
Benny: Generally speaking, of course, interference between parts of an assembly is to be avoided, though there are instances in which selective interference is desired. Interference checking can help you see where design adjustments might be needed to eliminate unwanted interference.Bruce: Speaking of interference, that’s all we have space for this time! Pro/E does offer other visualization tools; we’ve just been discussing those we find most useful. If you favor others, let us know.
Benny: Shoot us an e-mail if you have other observations about the visualization
tools in
Pro/E. As always, you can reach us at benny&bruce@rlhudson.com. Pro/E
is a fantastic program, so have fun visualizing all the possibilities
for great design!
Pro/E® and Pro/ENGINEER® are registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC).
