Simplify Your SOLIDWORKS Assembly Drawing with Display States

One use of display states is to help improve the clarity of information conveyed in a SOLIDWORKS assembly drawing. In the example below, we have a u-joint assembly drawing with a bill of materials. What if we want to include a view of one particular part in this assembly to highlight a specific dimension?

We can achieve this using display states. In the assembly model, we can create a new display state (select the Configurations tab, right-click in the FeatureManager > Add Display State).

Creating a new display state

After selecting the new display state “Bracket”, we can selectively hide components to only show the bracket component.

Bracket display state

Switching back to the drawing, we can bring up the drawing view palette and insert a right side view of the assembly. In the view FeatureManager, we can select the “Bracket” display state to show only the bracket component. We can focus on dimensions for this part, and balloon annotations will reference the assembly bill of materials.

Right side drawing view of “bracket” display state