SolidWorks® 2007 Bible

Chapter 14. Assembly Configurations and Display States

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Display States

• Assembly configurations

• Exploded views

• Tutorial: Working with assembly configurations

Assembly configurations enable you to control many things, including part configurations, suppression, visibility, color, and assembly feature sizes. They also allow you to control assembly layout sketch dimensions, mate values, suppression states, and several other items. What you will learn in this chapter about assembly configurations builds on the information in Chapter 10, which discussed part configurations. In this chapter, design tables will also be expanded upon to show how they are used in conjunction with SolidWorks assemblies.

The Display States function was new in SolidWorks 2006. Display States are a better performance alternative to using configurations to control visibility of parts in assemblies. Display State options are discussed at length in this chapter.

Using Display States

If you are using an older version of SolidWorks, then you may not have access to Display States, which were not introduced until SolidWorks 2006. They are a very useful addition to the software as they allow you to visualize the assembly in various ways. One of the best things about Display States is their ability to show parts in different display modes (Shaded, Wireframe, HLR, Shaded with Edges) simultaneously.

Users have always been able to show parts transparent and shaded at the same time, and a common workaround for combining ...