sending Solidworks drawing out for product manual illustrations 7

[randyoncad]

When saving a drawing out (even at high resolution setting) as an adobe illustrator file it imports to adobe & corel heavily pixelated or broken up. I'm trying to get a nice black & white dimensioned illustration of an assembly for a product manual and it's not going smoothly. I should be able do output my designs to graphics software or a document for this purpose and can't seem to get there without allot of modification to what comes out of solidworks. If I try to output a rendering, it's even worse. Am I missing something here? Is there a utility or function that accommodates this?

 

[Theophilus]

Why not save in PDF format. Adjust the line weights of your line drawings within SolidWorks, before making the export. This will at least generate vector output, even if the lines are short and hacked up a bit.

For renderings, there's no getting around the raster (pixel) output, since these are image files. But you can render an image of immense numbers of pixels if you like--several thousand pixels wide, for instance. Should do well if you're not printing bill boards.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people who value security over freedom will soon find they have neither.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

SW Tips/Tricks - July Issue (High-Resolution Screen Captures)

http://www.triaxialdesign.com/Tips_tricks/Tips&Tricks JUL-2008.pdf

 

[JMirisola]

If you're just looking to do B&W, just save the drawing as a dwg and bring it into corel. It used to work excellent when I was creating parts manuals.

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP, Certified DriveWorks AE

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/jeffs_blog

 

[EEnd]

Shaded drawing views are raster, not vector graphics. My experience has been that SolidWorks prints and saves as PDF these views at an unacceptably low resolution. To work around this, I have saved the drawing as an e-drawing and then printed the e-drawing to a PDF printer (Adobe, CutePDF, etc.). The shaded views are still rastered, but at a higher resolution.

Eric

 

[smcadman]

We save our drawings as a DXF and the graphics guys import it into there software without problems. Since it is a vector format, there is no pixelation to worry about.

These are not shaded views, just line drawings. Are you talking about shaded views instead?

Flores

 

[keepinitcool]

I've been outputting to edrawings. Although I haven't recently tried printing to PDF (bypassing the SW built-in PDF). If you use edrawings, then in non-shaded mode it will print to PDF in vector format. This is good, in that it allows the illustrator to adjust the view of a 3d model where they want it, and then generate a vector output.

For just 2D, DWG/DXF is good.

 

[ctopher]

There was another thread several months ago about this. I can't find it now.

Chris
SolidWorks/PDMWorks 08 3.1
AutoCAD 08
ctopher's home (updated Aug 5, 2008)
ctopher's blog
SolidWorks Legion

 

[cplicious]

What about using something like 3DVIA?

 

[Eltron]

I use Macromedia Freehand to improve the quality of line drawings. You can save your .dxfs and import directly then gussy them up to your desire. Plus it's free. I use this a lot for patent drawings and other miscellaneous nonsense.

Dan

http://www.eltronresearch.com

 

[Theophilus]

Looks like it used to be free until Adobe got a hold of their company...



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people who value security over freedom will soon find they have neither.

 

[DesignerGuy16]

.Tif files work well too, they scale much better when resized in MS word, etc.

James Spisich
Design Engineer, CSWP

 

[Redline8]

We're evaluating Deep Exploration CAD edition from righthemisphere.com. Looks promising, but we're not decided yet. 3DVia looks like it would be the ticket, but it's very expensive.

 

[Theophilus]

3DVia does look nice, but for the little we would make use of it, there's no way for us to justify the cost. Perhaps for those more in the publishing/presentation market specifically (which is normally not us).



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people who value security over freedom will soon find they have neither.

 

[bOILERbRAD]

Print to a TIF file. can't go wrong there!