MBD Notes for Beta 3.

1) You will need Toolbox installed. The Transmission assembly contains Hexalobular screws – which
are a new addition to the Toolbox in 2018

2) It is not possible to use a patterned datum in an Autodim scheme. This is not likely to be
supported in 2018.
3) To add the ‘General Note’ into the library open the Finished Cover part from the Finished Cover
Part Folder. You can then add the note to wherever convenient (annotations?). Use ‘Add To
Library’, select the note, change its name and hit OK. You may find that the note jumps slightly
after being placed.
4) The only way to change the Profile Tol value is to edit the Surface Profile feature in the
DimXpert feature manager
5) To enable display of Part PMI at the Assembly level, make sure the ‘Show DimXpert when
viewing component annotations’ is ticked in the Document properties

Also make sure component annotations are enabled in the HUD.

6) To toggle the display of PMI for individual components, RMB and toggle ‘Display Annotations’ in
each components Annotation folder.

7) The Auto Pair feature takes about 25s to complete in Beta 3. This should be improved in PR1 and
SP0. For a live demo, have the Door part saved with the feature already completed and just
show the steps.
 a. The Auto Pair feature is aimed at creating corresponding PMI in one part based on a
fixed or floating fastener arrangement. Take a look at these links for a more detailed
explanation of each:
i. http://www.engineersedge.com/fixed_fastener.htm
ii. http://www.engineersedge.com/floating_fastener.htm
iii. Auto Pair is not supported for patterned datums.

8) New PDF Templates will be available in PR1 or SP0. I have included a demo template in the data
folder – Part White A4 Landscape 2018.
9) For the video, I changed the Annotation color to black as there is currently a bug where depth
annotations are showing black in PDF
10) Custom property fields can now be set to config specific. I have set up the cover part to have
several configurations with different designers/part numbers etc. Feel free to personalize!
a. If you click on a custom property field in the Template Editor you will see the check box
to enable configuration specific.
 11) To enable the publishing of the 3D Notes into the PDF Text field you need to define an ‘Imported
Notes’

Drag the text box to define the size. I created one already under the General Notes label.

When you publish from SOLIDWORKS select the Next icon….

If you have selected a template with Imported Noted fields then you will be able to select them on
screen;

Note: You can have multiple imported note fields.

12) The MBD demo and eDrawings demo overlap slightly when discussing STEP 242. SOLIDWORKS 2018
now outputs Semantic PMI with the STEP AP242 file format. This means that other software can
 read the PMI information through APIs – ‘Machine Readable’. Previously the output was only
graphical ie could be shown and would cross highlight geometry but could not be read. When
reading PMI into SOLIDWORKS 2018 we read it in as Graphical PMI. We cannot (for example) reuse
datums in a DimXpert AutoDim operation.
a. You can set the color of imported PMI – Colors/Graphical Annotations

Other enhancements not covered in this demo:

1) PMI compare is improved. You can compare different versions from PDM. Also PMI Compare
does not rely on the parts being a copy of each other.
2) You can define and show General Tolerances as a table in the model. Go to
Insert/Tables/General Tolerance. You can also edit these (in excel). Switch to the custom
tolerance table in Doc Properties / DimXpert / General Tolerance.
3) You can Customize the columns exported from SOLIDWORKS into a PDF BoM table. Just choose
which to include/exclude during the Publish process.

Other Issues in Beta 3:

Component level PMI within Assemblies does not get exported correctly to PDF or STEP 242. (If you
publish the Transmission assembly to PDF it will not show the PMI you see in SOLIDWORKS)