noob question here, we’re still finding our way with SW. I’ve had a bunch of drawing “issue” questions come to me and most are fixed by not using “Draft Quality” views. The main ones I remember are showing lines of a buried component in an assembly drawing and more recently terrible zoom/pan performance. Both were resolved by switching the view (all of them on the sheet for the zoom/pan) to High Quality.
The zoom/pan slowness investigation lead me to believe that the draft quality is a raster image where high quality is a vector graphic. I thought zooming on a vector graphic would be slower than zooming a raster as the vector graphic “code” needs to be run each time the view is refreshed. But, then I noticed that the lines would scale on the raster, well that cannot happen unless the raster is generated at some zoom thresholds so that the lines weights appear to be scaling. I assume that it takes much longer to generate the raster image with new line weights than it does to just redraw the vector graphic?
So, if some wouldn’t mind saving me a several day witch hunt about when and why to use each type. Can we just avoid using draft quality drawing views altogether? Or is that going to have some ripple effect that I should have been prepared for?
Some very complex things will not show up unless your view is in draft quality. Edges of a part that has thread on it or edges of a spring come to mind. Not always…but I have had to switch to draft quality to fix display issues on those views with those parts in them
Draft View is often caused by surfaces, it is supposed to make things smoother on the drawing side, but for some reason it does the complete opposite for me. Not only that, but it makes the “printing” completely unacceptable. The view quality is so bad, the lines so thick, it’s just not worth it.
Edit: That and special shapes. For instance, we were able to exceed the limits set by SolidWorks for a radius, but that caused us the issue of having “draft quality” appear.
I asked my VAR about it a while back and he said, “It’s supposed to increase performance but he has noticed it can cause weird issues.” So he recommended to only use High Quality. I also noticed sometimes switching from Draft Quality to High Quality makes it possible to attach balloons to exploded DVs. See this thread https://www.cadforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=184
Thank you all for the replies. This does solve the problem we were seeing. I’m not sure why these views were set to true, I wonder if it is because they were auxiliary views positioned to provide view in line with the hole axis.
Sounds like in short we’re best to keep projected dimension style for views that are intended to be viewed as 2D projections and keep the true style just for the rare cases of dimensioning an isometric view?
You are correct sir. It generally happens on detail views. Isometric views will also be set to draft in general and when the ‘‘ressourced exceeded’’ message pops-up, sometimes they flicker. Sometimes you can’t switch 'em back and you simply need to restart.
So Solidworks is “helping” by not quite randomly switching views from High Quality to Draft Quality even though some VARs suggest avoiding Draft Quality for reasons including performance issues with Draft Quality. Furthermore when this happens the user may need to restart SW.
So it is safe to toggle the setting back and forth, it’s sort of up to the user for the moment? Has switching back and forth been known to cause problems with annotations or balloons, etc?
The only time I have seen issues with switching back and forth is when a spline surface is shown with a silhouette edge (i.e., the “edge” that you see when you look sideways at it…like the top of a round hill), then it can mess with that.
We’re getting on the Solidworks Train while we still have one foot on the Solid Edge Train.
I thought we were going to a CAD system that didn’t have all kinds of idiosyncrasies.
(thanks for the new emoji matt )
We need these on drawings, lots of them. Edge was iffy on holding sketch relations on a drawing after model updates, is Solidworks rock solid at maintaining sketch relations in drawings after model updates?
Also, most of these are to the tangent points on the silhouette edge spline to dimension over all width of cushion or from mounting plane up to top of backrest, etc. So I’m not confident I have a good way to hold that sketch point in the correct spot along the spline.
It depends what the geometry is and how it alters, but it’s not really good at maintaining relations to be honest.
Sometimes you can draw a line from an edge and have it be tangent to it and then you can also use that line as a “dimensiong” tool for your work arounds. Sketch entities are easier to reattach then simple dimensions, and dimensions will not lose their “relations” with sketch entities.
So it’s like a work-around, but a work-around that you also have to watch out for.
Sketch entities created inside the drawing.
Or
References that can be created in parts assemblies such as planes.
For example, image 1 and 2 show a dimension inside a drawing, made using 2 sketch entities created inside the drawing view.
Image 3 shows a dimension linked to a referenced geometry(plane). In this case it is used with a distance from one plane to another to create it, but in your case, your plane could be tangent to faces and what-not.
I wish this was part of the SW Training Essentials Book curriculum. Or maybe a class between Essentials and Advanced titled “Solidworkarounds You’ll Need To Know” That’s not a dig, just a component of the software that majority of users will run into and should be aware of.
(thanks for the new emoji matt )