Saving large assemblies as an eassembly not working well. When opening eassembly to view assembly, it is very slow opening, and when it does open, its almost impossible to move it around screen. It moves really slow, or just really jerky. I am running Solidworks 2016. We just upgraded from 2014 about 5 months ago, and we still can not get a fix for this issue.
I have been disappointed with performance of eDrawing also, so much that I avoid it entirely. I don't even deploy it to new PCs in our business. It is a flawed product. It is unsuitable for professional use. People who do use it likely do not know that alternatives exist. Improving or fixing this product is not a priority for its creators, even though it is sometimes the very first impression of the flawed 3D design software package upon new users, salesmen, business leaders (i.e. decision makers), and other non-designers. I could defecate on it more, but I think you may get the point by now.
Adobe Reader replaces this application entirely.
For viewing 2D drawings, this is very simple and straightforward, and shouldn't need further explanation.
For viewing interactive 3D models, including taking measurements and creating section views on the fly, I use 3D PDFs. Although I know it has been covered before, I cannot find the discussion to link. I'll summarize the issues.
Creating a 3D PDF
* Save As. Save as type: Adobe Portable Document Format (*.pdf). Then check the box below [√] Save as 3D PDF.
Opening a 3D PDF
* This must be enabled through Preferences -> 3D & Multimedia -> [√] Enable playing of 3D content.
* This must be set on every users' installation separately (at least those that will be opening it). It persists.
Interacting with 3D PDF
* Find a demo on YouTube. I won't elaborate. There are many options and controls for views.
* A 3D mouse is helpful but not necessary. To use it in Adobe Reader, I had to upgrade the mouse driver.
* Click one edge or face, then tape measure icon to measure it. Click two entities to measure between them.
Known issues:
* It doesn't always work. This is always the case when assembly contains a horribly broken and error-filled imported component. If this hinders your use, then do not use horribly broken and error-filled imported components, but rather fix it completely, suppress that item, and/or replace it with an appropriate placeholder component.
* Very large assemblies are accordingly slow to create, load in viewer, and interact in views. Still, it's way better than eDrawings.
EITHER: Provide your shop users expensive design workstations to merely view eDrawings, or adapt to 3D PDFs on moderately capable PC's, tablets, phones, hololens, cerebral implant, or whatever hand-me-down hardware they use normally.
3D PDFs most notably do not require impressive hardware specs to perform well!
Agreed, I've stopped using edrawings completely and use PDF exclusively.
I'd have to look into the 3D pdf. option. We paid for 5 viewer licences so we might as well give it a try and see. I'll keep you posted on what happens. Its Very new to the shop guys. (only a week)
Currently looking into a replacement for EDrawings as it is not even usable in its current state. Even with top of the line engineering workstations, our assemblies are slide shows on EDrawings. Yet again, a piece of useful software that the Solidworks development team has rendered useless with their "updates" each year.
Currently looking at pricing on "Glovius Solidworks viewer". The free trial has already showed itself to be leaps and bounds better than the now useless Edrawings.
Glovius is running $400 per licence, and I need quite a few.
The 3D PDF method sounds like it would be a cheaper route, but I have a few questions.
Can you hide parts to see inside an assembly? Also, can you get part numbers by highlighting items? These are critical to our build process.
Thanks.
Yes to hiding (or transparency/sections/isolate/saved views & more) and yes to part NAMES. I don't believe that you can extract values from custom properties found in parts, or at least I haven't tried that. There is an interactive part list, if i recall correctly.
Hi, very good is SOLIDWORKS Composer Player (you must install player to show .smg extension in save as dialog in SolidWorks). I think is even better than 3D PDF. But in free version you can´t mesure, view component tree and other good stuff. But large assemblies are lightning fast. I installed many viewers and didn´t saw better one in performance point of view.
You have to buy Composer to allow measure, .....
Get used to it.
Solidworks has dropped the ball, the program and the whole idea of making Edrawings useful.
Makes me look silly after recommending it to managers for viewing what projects are looking like.
The performance improvements in eDrawings 2019 seem to be massive, orders of magnitude over 2018 and older versions from the testing I have done. I haven't found an assembly yet that will bog it down on a decent system. I would encourage anybody who hasn't taken a look at it in a while to try out the 2019 viewer!
Also for 2019 all the features that previously required "Pro" like Measure are bumped down to standard free viewer.
We have eDrawing viewer on some PC's in the Shop and they can see our Vault (read only) but there viewer is very choppy and slow. I'd love to see if you find an answer to this.