Apr 16
Oct 19
Aug 20
Jul 12
You can highlight aspects of your image by creating an .svg with Technical Illustrator in 3DVIA Composer.
Jul 10
When creating an image of your product for marketing or instruction manuals you will probably want to add your company image to the model (referred to in 3DVIA as actor). Composer will allow you to do this as long as the logo is in Bitmap, Jpeg, Tara or RGB format.
Jun 05
On occasion you will notice that when you export your .smg file and preview it, it will have created a black back ground. This is obviously not ideal. You will generally only see this happen when you are exporting and have color region turned on. There is a work around for this!
Go to File > Preferences > Advance Settings, then scroll down to Hardware and enable the HardwareSupport.SilhouetteShader setting.
You will need to restart 3DVIA for the setting to take effect.
May 08
When working in 3DVIA Composer you will notice that there is a DDS symbol on the ground. If you want to remove this, or change it to something else you can.
3DVIA Composer - DSS logo on ground
Apr 24
This tip is especially useful for users with a Floating Composer license!
If there are multiple users of 3DVIA Composer that would like to share a common library location, it’s not obvious how to go about configuring them all to do this. With a bit of text editing and copy/pasting, it’s fairly straighforward thankfully.
First off if you tried to figure this out yourself, you will probably start by going to (in Composer): File -> Preferences -> Data Paths, and you’ll see this:
Data Paths Dialog
Apr 02
3DVIA Composer Plug-in for SolidWorks: How to Configure Default Export Settings?
SolidWorks 3D Design, SolidWorks Composer, Tech Tips No Comments
For those users of 3DVIA Composer that periodically need to ask a SolidWorks designer to export files into the native Composer file type, this tip is for you!
This is a very specific scenario where the users of SolidWorks do not have 3DVIA Composer installed on their machine, but they do have the Composer plug-in installed to allow them to export their SolidWorks files to the native .SMG Composer file type. In this scenario, the SolidWorks user has no easy way of customizing the export options that are used when creating the Composer file. So as a result, things like file properties (metadata), could be missing or you may have surface bodies appearing in Composer, or solid bodies not showing. In this case, it would be nice to be able to customize the options used for the export. The answer is not an easy one unfortunately. Reach out to your VAR and they can provide assistance. There are some registry settings that we can supply to allow customizing these options. When you contact your VAR, mention SolidWorks Solution ID #S-023057.
See image below for a view of the Composer plug in, in SolidWorks.
Composer Plug-in menu in SolidWorks
Mar 05
Licensing of Composer is done though a FlexLM license service which is very common in the software industry. All licenses of Composer are Node-locked to a computer “MAC” address (even Standalone ones). Activation is common with SolidWorks but not Composer. Whether you have a Standalone or Network license type, the “Media Access Control” address or “MAC” address (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address) of the machine that is going to issue the license for the software is needed. The software license is “locked” to the MAC address provided. In the case of Standalone, it is the MAC address of the machine that the software will be used on. In the case of a Network license, it is the MAC address of the license server machine. If needed, the MAC address can be changed and a new license file created. There is a form to fill out and submit to SolidWorks. Please allow at least 2 business days for this.
