Animation Composer Alternative

[Francesca Cruiz]

Youare a beginner and looking into to hair, particles and cloth sims ? Wow, good for you ! These are all pretty advanced. The solution is either to bake all of that out in blender to standard meshes with keyframed animation or to do all of that native from scratch in composer. You will get much much better performance if you just do all of that in Composer.

Communicate your designs with content authoring software that allows anyone to create high-quality raster images, vector line art, or interactive product animations. The resulting materials will be as stunning as your designs.

The simple, intuitive interface gives you tools to help you easily develop informative graphics for a broad range of technical communications; this includes assembly instructions, product manuals, training materials, and marketing collateral, with content that can be updated automatically.

Because SOLIDWORKS Composer is associative, you can automatically update any changes you make to the CAD models in your technical communication deliverables. For the first time, you can get products to market faster with the assurance that your documentation is both high-quality and accurate.

SOLIDWORKS Composer pictures and animations are particularly valuable in simplifying assembly instructions and work orders. You can directly show 3D views of how your product is assembled or repaired, reducing errors on the shop floor, eliminating language barriers, and significantly minimizing localization costs.

With its simple, intuitive user interface, SOLIDWORKS Composer requires virtually no learning curve. Detailed training materials, in-depth help files, online tutorials, and user forums ensure that even nontechnical staff can start publishing professional 3D visuals almost instantly.

In addition to images, Composer can also output animations in the form of video or, interactively, through the free Composer Player. Just like images, animations are simple to create in Composer and will provide the same, unified, aesthetic that is critical in a professional publication.

Conveying motion and how components interact with each other can be a challenge to illustrate through static images, but Composer has extremely powerful authoring tools to make this a breeze. The secret lies within the arrows that can be associated directly to the model geometry in Composer. Linear and circular arrows can be aligned with model edges and faces, and the arrows will move with the components to which they are associated. While being easy to place and adjust, these arrows have special functionality to always stay flat to the computer screen. This means the arrows looks great from every angle and are immediately image ready.

3DEXPERIENCE Works provides a Safe, Social, Connected, Informed and Structured alternative to SOLIDWORKS Composer for team leaders, project managers and other professionals who want to manage data on the cloud and collaborate without constraints.

Social: Integrated structured and unstructured collaboration tools enabling social innovation. Collaborate on product design or engage with your stakeholders early in product development.

Structured: Zero overhead data management - store and manage data across collaborative spaces, share information in communities. Find indexed data faster by using tags, custom search, etc.

Autodesk used to have "Inventor Publisher" which was dropped due to low usage and while they tried to sell the current IPN solution as the replacement for that it falls flat on its face in many aspects...

Right now your "true/complete" needs are a mystery (to us anyways) but if you need EVERYTHING that SW composer has then there is no 100% direct equivalent to all of its functionality.. You have a Ford car and a Chevy car right now.. Both are cars.. They don't work exactly the same.. Both will get you places you need to go.. But only you can answer if one has all the features you need..

I pitched a client on it (some of that client's equipment was on the splash screen of the 2013 release), got them on board, and bought a license for testing. It would choke on some of the simplest assemblies we had. As a result, I never used it in production.

I am finding the IPN snapshot workflow very work intensive. I've posted about it here quite a few times and there's an Idea or two out there asking for the timeline/snapshot thing to be removed or hidden, and for the pre-2017 workflow to be re-instated.

I'm been doing step by step screenshots of 3d models for years now as our sole assembly documentation and quality has really improved and the amount of "questions about the process" have dropped drastically.. I would love to have the ability to provide that data in a true 3d/animated representation to our assemblers but the tech just isn't there yet from what I've seen/tried...

I'm really curious to know how other engineers or users of 3D CAD within an engineering organisation handle the provision of assembly data to manufacturing. I too think that creating 2D documentation from a more advanced 3D CAD model seems like a waste of time - some places I've liaised with actually take our 3D CAD model and turn it into various 2D orthographic views, then DWG it all. Implementing any change must take forever.

I've only worked for one organisation since leaving uni, so the way we do it is the only way I've ever experienced - which is to create an 'assembly manual' showing stage-by-stage assembly steps, using exploded views generated from the CAD via the IPN environment. We have up-to-date views that change when the model changes, and as it's a document we can add notes, part number leadouts, checklists, etc etc.

We've talked about using animations for months but the main tripping point for us is the loss of anywhere to put technical notes. When an assembly operator plays the animation, sure they can see how and where the components fit...but how do they know what the components are? Or what torque to set? Or which PCB pin to route the wire to? We'd need a separate document with those notes on, and then we're kind of missing the point of the animation. Also, animations can't be 'marked up' for proposed engineering change.

This is why I'm confused by the change to the IPN environment in 2017 - to my mind, animations just aren't the best way to convey assembly data because of the loss of other essential information, and either I'm missing something here and my company are just way behind the times, or the IPN changes were made without proper user input and are actually confounding some users. I don't really know.

I'm keen to improve things and always open to change, if it improves our yield and build consistency without increasing our design office workload (which is something the snapshot/timeline thing has done).

I don't view it as an either-or situation, both have their place. Ever gone to a presentation where the speaker just repeats what's on screen? Or one where the presenter shows a couple of graphics and talks... and talks... and talks...? The best ones are in the middle: the screen gives an overview and show things that spoken words have difficulty with, while the speaker talks through the details provided in handouts (which are more than just what's on screen).

I start by creating design view reps in Inventor of each main assembly step.. In each of those I assign "indicator colors" that I have created to the parts of interest.. (I on;t show parts that are there in real life and future added parts are not shown obviously)..

I take screenshots from Inventor and using their WYSIWYG editor simply make a webpage basically composed of my 3d screenshots and text placed on that page which is how I indicate torque values and provide steps like

Thank you for the detailed description, your system sounds quite impressive. I like the idea of setting colours for the fitted parts, and the idea that your operators can simply open up a webpage and head straight to their required instructions. Also the idea of using touchscreens sounds good - something I think we could move to in the future, to get away from using mouse and keyboard which clutter up workbenches. If you ever did decide to produce a demo or example of your system, I'd certainly read it!

Both Cadasio and SolidWorks Composer allow you to create images from your CAD data for use in your instruction manuals, however both software have distinct differences which you need to understand before making the right decision for your business. We have highlighted what we believe to be the major considerations to make when comparing the software. It's also worth pointing out that SolidWorks Composer also goes by the name CATIA composer within the CATIA software channel. There are very few differences (mainly the differences in file compatibility and price) so everything below is also relevant to anyone looking for a CATIA Composer alternative.

Whilst there is no doubt that printed instruction manuals still have their place, people are increasingly looking for alternatives. Cadasio focuses on 3D output as we believe it to be the future. We generate 3D, interactive content which can improve the end users experience and understanding of your product whilst also reducing printing costs, making your business more sustainable.

SolidWorks Composer can produce 3D content. It has a separate player which allows people to view Composer documents, but who wants to download an additional viewer just to see how to assemble something? The viewer itself is based on ActiveX technology, which is so old and vulnerable to security issues that it is actually blocked on modern browsers, and certainly won't work on Android or IOS devices. You need specific hardware to run Composer (see below) and the same is true for the Composer Player. Can you guarantee the people you want to share your documents with have a CAD grade computer?

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