In the past year, more and more people have asked or wanted to transform things into digital. I believe that the trigger point is due to the social distant that we are going through in these 2 years. Companies or colleges are searching for the alternative solution to try to keep everything run as normal as before – so called “New Normal”.

Therefore, one of the changes happened to manufacturing is the transform of the technical drawings – the “Drawingless / Paperless” approach. It means that printing the 2D drawings to communicate is no longer necessary. We can have better communication tools named Model Base Definition (MBD) to create the technical drawings in 3D environment.

Model Base Definition (MBD)

In SolidWorks, we have an add-on called MBD, it can create all necessary product manufacturing information (PMI) such as dimension and specification note in drawing area with the MBD dimensions tool. Then, you can capture different orientation views and output as 3D PDF, eDrawings & step. file to communicate with others.

3D PDF

First thing first, to enable 3D content in PDF viewer, you need to go to: edit à preferences à multimedia & 3D à check the “Enable playing of multimedia and 3D content”, then you can view the 3D content in PDF.

With the 3D PDF generated from MBD, you can easily rotate/zoom the 3D model, have dynamic highlight while you selected the dimension. Those information on top of the PDF and note area can be loaded from cad file, so you don’t need to type it every single time.

Not only part model can use this 3D PDF format, the exploded view or BOM table can also include with assembly files.

Here will share the 3D PDF file for above example, you can download and try it.

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