SOLIDWORKS Tech Tip – Assembly Visualization

SOLIDWORKS Assembly Visualization can be used for a variety of tasks like interrogation and analysis of your top-level design or model performance. It’s a powerful tool to paint a color scale on top of your assembly components based on any property or internally computed data (numeric or categorical). It also provides a fast way to create a tabular output of your assembly’s custom properties to Excel .XLS

One example would be to list and display the largest contributors to your product’s total mass:

Image 1 – Using Assembly Visualization to understand highest Mass components

This makes sense intuitively, to take a numerical property that most of our parts have (we are all defining Mass Custom Properties, right?) and create an output that orders and paints a scale. Think about what information you might be capturing that would be useful to visualize this way. And not just numerical data, but categorical – think about Material:

Image 2 – Viewing Categorical Data like Material

Or in a team environment, or as a project manager, taking a look at Status of each component:

Image 2B – … or Status.

Finally, there is information internal to SOLIDWORKS that we don’t typically think of as a Custom Property, but would be valuable to order and isolate in our assemblies. ‘Performance Analysis’ is a new button that shows useful metrics to isolate components contributing to slower than desired performance:

Image 3 – Isolating the top contributors to Assembly Performance

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Brian Zias

Senior Territory Technical Manager at Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS

Brian is a 15-year, expert SOLIDWORKS CAD, FEA, and CFD user and community advocate. His interests include engineering, simulation, team leadership, and predictive analytics. Brian holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA in Data Science.