For those of us in the northern hemisphere — hot enough for ya? Welcome to the dog days of summer! To help keep you cool, Tod has put together a set of tips and tricks that will turn complicated animations into quick and easy work — getting you out of the hot seat, on your way home, and into your hammock in no time!

Tod shows how powerful yet easy it is to mix up and incorporate some advanced stuff: assembly groups, parent/inherited animations, assembly selection mode, grid snapping, primitives, timeline filtering by selected objects… just to name a few.

Enjoy!

Shuji, from our Japan team, wanted to explain to us the sequence of events leading up to the hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima reactor. He found a 3D model of the reactor and loaded it into 3DVIA Composer. He then merged in some additional geometry (piping, rods, etc), and quickly built an animation detailing the various technical details that occurred after the catastrophic earthquake a few weeks ago.

Using 3D animations in this way — to educate and explain technical concepts — provides a simple and compelling way to quickly create and information. Thanks to Shuji for preparing this information in 3DVIA Composer, it is very interesting to understand the sequence of events describing this very unfortunate disaster.

A few of us from 3DVIA had a great opportunity to team up with Jeremy and the entire Let’s Go Design team at SolidWorks, on their Ultimate CAD Chair project. We were very impressed at the amount of work that was involved in not only building this custom chair, but documenting the progress, taping the video, and coordination with vendors.

This video is a bit of “behind the scenes” footage of the creation of Episode #5 of the Ultimate CAD Chair.

Jeremy asked us to help out with building “easy to understand” assembly instructions with 3DVIA Composer, to assist in communicating the design intent of how all the pieces of the Ultimate CAD Chair went together. We also put together a virtual scene, where you can walk around the Ultimate CAD Chair yourself. This was easily built by just uploading SolidWorks CAD files to 3dvia.com, then drag-and-dropping them into the scene. Check it out here:  http://www.3dvia.com/scenes/4243AC784A5C6E40/ultimate-cad-chair

Stay tuned, as we are also building a realistic Let’s Go Design Studio room, so everyone can see Jeremy’s great work area at the SolidWorks office.

In case you haven’t seen the highlights for our latest release, check out this video!

SolidWorks World 2010 was a great event!

This was my first SWW ever, and I was extremely impressed with the presentations, the strong community of users, and how well organized the event was.  It was great to speak to so many users, and meet other SolidWorks and Dassault Systèmes employees.  From my perspective, there were four hot topics that came out of the show, which I share in this quick video.

Thanks to the SolidWorks team for their input in this video.  Jeremy Luchini designed the Hot Rod electric car model in SolidWorks, which you can see here on 3dvia.com.

If you want to see more videos from SWW 2010, go here to the SolidWorks YouTube page.

For more information of the benefits of 3DVIA Composer for SolidWorks users, check out the 3dmojo blog or these Cliff’s Clips I created for SolidWorks users:

• 3DVIA People:  Interview with John Hirschtick
• The Best Way to Share Your CAD Designs
• Putting 3DVIA Products to Good Use

I’m already looking forward to SolidWorks World 2011!

We put many of our products together (3dvia.com, 3DVIA Composer, 3DVIA Mobile) into one video to tell the story of how users can take advantage of all the new 3D technologies we offer.

In this video, I play the role of a Copier Salesman, Emmy is an Office Manager (the customer), and Garth plays the Product Manager.  Garth and I work together to easily solve a problem using 3DVIA.

Oh, and Garth really is one of the hardest working guys in the office, not like the role he plays here.

We must give credit to the 3D models used in this video:

- The Audi Tt by jled

- ScubaGarths Copier:  Before, and After

- And, a cameo appearance by Tex-Rex by IsaacMiller1993

Who’s Garth Coleman? We’ll around here, he is known as ScubaGarth, or “The Composer Guy”. Garth is one of the most passionate people at 3DVIA and someone who we want you to meet.

Garth works almost entirely on 3DVIA Composer, and and has been helping companies to make technical documentation easier for the people who produce and consume it.

Watch the video to find out more about the future of manufacturing documentation, “3D Communication” and “car jumps”…you’ll see.

And…if you want to see more of Garth, he is always producing new webcasts and materials on 3DVIA Composer on the 3D Mojo Blog.