-

Bruce from a local compnay had some questions about 3DVIA after he went through some training and wanted to know if anyone else in the area used it, Clem See responds:

Good day to you Bruce,
I don't use 3dvia myself, but I thought I could throw my 2cents in about what I've seen it used for.  I used to work for a SolidWorks reseller in the Seattle area, before that, and most currently I worked for TSL here in Yakima.  When I was working for the reseller, we had customers using 3dvia in a couple ways.  First, and most creatively, we worked with a yacht manufacturer in Westport that used it to visualize their ships completely assembled.  The completed master assembly of their 150 foot yacht was too big to open in SolidWorks and be manipulable.  Due to the nature of 3dvia however, they could drop the whole assembly into 3dvia and move the master around, and manipulate it much better. 

The traditional way that it gets used, and probably one of the ways that Quest demoed it to you was as a document creation tool.  Most of the customers that I saw using it used it for this purpose.  Most of those companies had been using MS Word, and photos, or screenshots of their SolidWorks models to create literature, for their mechanisms.  In this sense 3dvia is purely and art tool.  At TSL I would love to have been using 3dvia to create our machine manuals.  The only problem is it is a little expensive, and a new position would need to be created just to start making the huge manuals we made.  You still need an authoring tool like Word, or Publisher to make the words for your manuals, but 3dvia allows for very high quality images to be created to be inserted into the manual.  The types of images it creates, as well as the instruction related icons such as arrows and whatnot are better aligned with what you would see in a professional document, and it was easier to make.  When I orient a model in 3dvia there are tens of different ways to visualize the model, as opposed to SolidWorks only having wireframe and shaded views.  Updating the views when the models get revised is then pretty simple as well.

The underutilized way in my experience for it, is in the creation of interactive exploded view and diagraming.  This was for creating many different assembly/dissasembly instructions to be used with a laptop/tablet computer or a phone.  With this method you use 3dvia to create an animation of things being exploded, then you use a template provided by 3dvia to make it into an html document that can be pulled up on a computer in the field for a more interactive paperless experience.

Downsides that I saw was the price, and the installation process, that just like with SolidWorks, has a few steps, and of course personnel.  Some companies are lucky enough to have a document creation person, or team.  If you don't, you have someone just throwing images and pdfs together and printing them in addition to their normal job.  With 3dvia, at least at first, somebody is going to need to have some time to get familiar with all the things that can be done, and create the initial standard views.  This person might also need a license of SolidWorks if they don't already, (or the ability to obtain a license from the license server, if you are running one). 

On the upside, once the groundwork has been laid, it would require much less time to create subsequent useful images for document.  Also 3dvia has it's own support team and they are really good, you can usually bypass Quest, and go directly to 3dvia main support.  I do not know if Quest has a 3dvia specialist currently.  Also it gets updated fairly frequently and they are constantly adding helpful tools.

Overall a pretty useful tool for what it is.  If you have any questions feel free to reply to me if you don't find someone else locally that can help.  I don't have it installed anywhere so I can't really be super specific, but while I worked for the reseller I did get a bit of hands on.

Have a great week,
Clem See