Quick and easy way to create your drawings – a 60 seconds tutorial of SolidWorks MBD

Posted on May Mon, 2018 by Do Thai Quoc Dung

MBD represents Model Based Definition, it uses 3D models (such as solid model), product manufacturing information (PMI) and the associated metadata to define a single component or assembly. In contrast, traditional methods require 2D engineering drawings to provide such details.

SolidWorks MBD is an integrated paperless manufacturing solution for SolidWorks. It helps companies define, organize and publish 3D product manufacturing information (PMI), which includes 3D model data using industry standard file formats. Unlike traditional 2D engineering drawings, SolidWorks MBD can guide manufacturing processes directly in 3D, simplifying production process, shortening cycle times, reducing errors, and helping to comply with industry standards. SolidWorks MBD documents can also be released in a wide range of file formats, such as eDrawings and 3D PDF. 3D PDF is a PDF document that includes 3D models and PMI, which can be opened in free Adobe Reader.

To the manufacturers who want to avoid the miscommunications from 2D drawings and use intelligent 3D representation for manufacturing to standardize and automate downstream production, SolidWorks MBD, which is a drawing-less application, can be directly used to define, sort and release products with manufacturing specifications in a 3D environment, thus eliminate ambiguity, cut costs and shorten the time to market.

So how can we define a model’s 3D manufacturing information quickly and accurately? Let’s take a look at the following example:

For such a model, based on our experience, it may take 10-20 minutes to make the 2D drawing including all the dimensions, tolerances, and etc. However, today, if we use SolidWorks MBD for 3D tagging, the efficiency will be greatly improved. So let’s see how that works:

First, we switch to the SolidWorks MBD Tab, and select the “Auto Dimension Scheme” directly, as shown in the figure below:

In the ” Auto Dimension Scheme “, we only need to select “Part Type”, confirm the type of tolerance and “pattern dimensioning” , then select the Reference Features.

We keep the other options as default, and then, we’ll just click on OK. After a few seconds, we’ll see the following picture:

Next, we’ll switch to the other views to capture. Of course, if you feel this view contains too many details, you also can choose to manually assign and capture the tolerances to make it much concise.

When we have captured all of the views, we can click the “Publish to 3D PDF” button and release our drawing. It is worth noting that the PDF file we released is 3D and rotatable, which means that we do not need to worry if the users misunderstand or misread the drawings.

Source: Mi Le – Assistant Manager Engineer at SeaCAD