A VERY SWELL IDEA, INC.
PALM HARBOR, FLORIDA

A very Swell Idea, Inc. Jason of Symmetry Solutions (SolidWorks VAR) began the presentations with the announcement of a rebranding of 3DVia Composer to SolidWorks Composer, bringing the product more in line with its target audience. The same license manager used by SolidWorks will eventually replace the cumbersome Composer licensing. Jason gave an overview of Composer’s uses, applications and capabilities. SolidWorks Composer is intended to be the bridge between Engineering and Technical Publications/Marketing as it extends the use of 3D CAD data beyond Engineering. He showed examples of its ability to produce marketing materials, printed materials, interactive instructions, web content and animations. The latest version (SolidWorks Composer 2013r2) has content loaded into its familiar Model Browser and Image Library tools. A library of 3D objects like a posable hand and typical hand tools (screw driver, wrench, etc.) can be quickly added to a project. The Image Library now has a whole set of standard icon images to save time in content authoring. Jason then spent some time showing basic content authoring details. He demonstrated how Views can control every property in a scene (camera, material appearance, actor position, etc.) or any combination of properties. He showed how the Select Instances tool can quickly select all of the same part for modification. He showed that Styles work better than in previous releases and they can be written to a file, making them sharable. Styles can be applied once or “subscribed to” which makes the properties update automatically when the Style is changed. Jason then gave a presentation about basic animation authoring. He suggested that a good workflow would progress from actor movements to camera movements to property adjustments to annotation text. He elaborated on an order of operation for actor movement that included picking an actor, setting its start location key frame, moving the actor and then setting its end key. He emphasized that the key frames only control what has changed from one key to the next so care should be taken to modify properties accordingly. For making interactive animation controls, Jason demonstrated new tools found in Author – Image2D such as a play button that has the necessary control code built-in.