Technical Publications

Ever wondered how those illustrations you see in technical documentation or product manuals are produced?

Well you may be surprised to know they are probably ‘traced’ from screen grabs of the CAD screen, photos of the actual component, or drawn from scratch, certainly not high-tech!

Now with 3DVIA Composer you can produce high quality technical illustrations directly from your CAD data irrespective of its format and quickly keep it up to date as your design evolves.

What does this mean to me?

Quite simply this provides the ability to..

Dramatically reduce your first run technical illustration production times.
Reduce re-do work through design changes to a minimum.
Reduce overall product development time by starting your illustration definition well before the design is even finished.
Improve illustration accuracy and quality by producing a direct representation of the product data, not an interpretation.

In addition to these benefits, you also have the opportunity to reduce your illustration overhead costs, such as design office support or maybe even the need for a trained CAD seat.

Don’t forget, the CAD data needed to produce these images has already been produced, so why not use what is already there?

What can I actually do with the software?

To be honest, it's more a question of what can’t you do with it.

Illustration Production

Produce silhouettes; control line weights, colouration and image quality; remove tangent lines (edges) and apply selective cross sectioning retrievable as one of many 'Profiles'.

Views

Manipulate, hide, explode, apply transparency, annotate, markup and then capture each state of the model as any number of ‘View’s to then drive your illustration production.

Annotation And Styles

Quickly apply attribute driven or free form annotations, labels, arrows, panels, images and highlights from your set of custom ‘Style’s.

BOM Information

Introduce Bill Of Materials information by applying BOM ids, controlling their visibility in ‘View’s and producing associative BOM tables within your illustrations.

Outputs

Once produced, output your illustration as SVG, CGM Level 4, Postscript or to Tech Illustrator.

Update It All

Remember that all your illustrations can be quickly and simply updated through associativity with the source CAD data. If the CAD data updates, you can choose to update also.

Batch Production

If you are happy with your illustrations, the 3DVIA Sync tools can update all your illustrations automatically every time a design update is detected.

Software