Beginner Tutorials
A Simple Guide to Working with eDrawings that everyone should use!
"Explore the powerful features of eDrawings with our comprehensive guide! 🌟 Learn how to effectively view, interact with, and share 3D assembly models. This video covers:
✅ Basic navigation tools like pan, rotate, and zoom
✅ Display options including wireframe, shaded, and exploded views
✅ Interactive features such as animation, measurements, and sectioning tools
✅ Advanced capabilities like markup, annotations, and exporting files
Whether you're a CAD expert or a non-technical user, eDrawings simplifies the review process and enhances collaboration. Watch now to unlock the full potential of this versatile tool! 🚀
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View transcript
Okay. So now we've looked at how we can publish an Edrawings. Let's take a look at what we can do with it. So back to our assembly in Edrawings, You can see here the assembly model. Start with icons across the top of the screen. So we've got our general selection tool. We've got pan rotate and zoom exactly the same as we have in SOLIDWORKS. I won't dwell on those too much. We also have zoom to selection. Zoom to area. So useful for just quickly zooming into a certain region of interest. We've also got, controls for perspective, and ambient occlusion as well. So you can get some nice realistic shadowing effects. We also have the standard view orientations front back, top right, etc.. Again exactly like SOLIDWORKS and also some display styles. So we can view the model in wireframe shaded with edges and plain shaded. We have a look down on the bottom. We have options for kind of resetting the view back to normal. So if you got a little bit muddled up with settings etcetera, we can return that back to how it was imported. We've got an animate button. The great benefit of Edrawings is that we work natively in 3D so that we can animate model. So if someone is a, a non CAD user or maybe he's not a technical, they don't need to worry about zooming, panning and rotating. They can just hit the play button automatically to view the model rotate around. It's a great way for just reviewing the design. We can also explode the view. So if there is an exploded view stored in the SOLIDWORKS file, these will be presented in here and we can toggle these on and off. So I have a preset exploded view. You can see with the some of the hardware separated out. We can also use a slide bar to play the exploding collapse sequence. Again this is very easy to use, just dragging the slider back and forth to toggle that mode on and off. To reset this, we just hit reset and go back to the home screen. We can individually move parts, so perhaps you didn't have an explode sequence set up. We can still just pick up individual parts and drag them out just by clicking. Edrawings doesn't support the mates that we have in this SOLIDWORKS CAD file, which is very useful for us just to be able to move these parts around and drill down into that assembly. Again, don't worry, we can't break this. We can hit the reset button and take us back to normal in the move command. The default is a free drag and there are settings for, positional information. And translate and rotate. So if we needed to explicitly move it, a component in a certain x y z direction. But we could do that. We can measure. So if you remember the setting we had when we published the drawing in the first instance, as long as that was enabled, it will allow the recipient to come in here and use the measure commands to start picking up, measurements between anything they can click on. So it could be x, y, z distances between these two holes here. Notice with any holes or cylindrical objects, we have got settings to choose, center to center or minimum distance or maximum distance between the selected entities. Very useful for, working out ball centers. Anything you click on can be. Measured. So whether it's just a pair of faces or edges or points, we can extract, you know, useful information, automatically. We also have sectioning tools. This, much like SOLIDWORKS, allows us to put a plane through the model and drag back and forth in different orientations. And you can see very intuitive and easy to use just by dragging the cursor back and forth. We can change the plane orientation. There's some presets to align to x, y, and z. Directions. In the model. We can flip any of these as well so we can flip the planes. Opposite side just by dragging around. We can view normal to the plane. We can also. Choose to hide the plane. If you needed to. Maybe you were just going to do a quick screenshot of a review purposes. It wasn't required to see the cutting plane. And we can also choose to create the cap or not. So you'll notice, if I zoom in here, what would be. The section faces in the real. World? There'd be some solid material left. If we wanted to kind of just see through the, the skin of the model. We can choose to deselect the cap. It often gives it a little bit more of a complicated view, I guess, but, useful for seeing inside the part. Again, to return to normal, we can either deselect section or press the home button. And the last thing a look at down here is stamps. Stamps are our list of predefined PNGs. You can actually add your own in here. So if there was, a watermark we needed to add to this before we send it out. We can do that. And we can, you know, resize these to any anything that is appropriate. That means that anyone viewing this file or printing it out has a watermark on there as well. Just adds our extra bit of them. So, security. So there's no misinformation on misuse of the file. The last functions down here in the interface are mask properties. This allows us to, call back information such as our total weight, volume, surface area. In, in multiple types of units. So you can select those as well as decimal places. We've also got markup tools. These are really useful for, I guess, bidirectional communication. Edrawings is, great. Receiving data back from the recipient. So it could be that you want to create a call out, just to, put a comment on, about a certain component, a comment to, say, change material. For bold, perhaps, it logs a time and date that the user created the comment. And we have a range of other kind of tools. If you wanted to scribble on this, we could, you know, start adding additional, annotation styles to, to to make that, mark more visible. We can even add pictures and images in here as well. We could add dimensions on here. So if there was perhaps another, another change required, perhaps, the the distance between these, these bolts. We could add that on and say, you know, increase to 75mm. So again, a whole range of useful markup tools, to allow feedback from the, from the recipient. We can even save those comments back. So if you want to send that file back to a SOLIDWORKS user to view, by clicking the save icon, it generates a up file, which you can then email or send back to the original sender. You can view any annotations that might have been stored in the model if there was any 3D views. It's useful if you're using SOLIDWORKS, MBD We can recall the 3D views and annotated views to display any information about the, model. And the last one is component. So in this case this is an assembly. So we have a full list of, of the components. Make that assembly up with the structure as it was in SOLIDWORKS. This supports full cross highlighting. So if we select any of these, objects in the, in the tree, the model window highlights the corresponding parts as well. And this works the other way as well. So we highlight the parts. The tree is enabled. Now this allows us to also kind of view the, you know any sort of file names and configuration names and descriptions that would have been stored in SOLIDWORKS. We've also got some controls here for showing all of the model. We can hide parts individually. So if I wanted to right click, we get various options for hiding and showing components. So perhaps I want to hide this cover or hide the. Sole just to show the mechanism we can do that. We can even isolate parts on their own. So I might want to just control select just like in SOLIDWORKS. Selection of components and then just show those on their own so you can get a better understanding of their of a component, in its own viewport. Revert back to the, I guess, bring all the components back. We can either use these components here to show all and they get faded back in. Or we could have just went and press the home button to go back to the start again.