SolidWorks 2010 Bible

CHAPTER

Controlling Assembly

Configurations and

Display States

IN THIS CHAPTER

Changing visual properties by

using Display States

Using assembly configurations

to manage large assemblies

Using exploded views to see

an assembly’s parts

Working with assembly

configurations tutorial

A

ssembly configurations enable you to control many things, including
part configurations, suppression, visibility, color, and assembly fea-
ture sizes. They also enable you to control assembly layout sketch
dimensions, mate values, suppression states, and several other items. What
you learn in this chapter about assembly configurations builds on the infor-
mation in Chapter 10, which discusses part configurations. In this chapter,
you also learn how you can use design tables in conjunction with
SolidWorks assemblies.

Display States are a better performance alternative than configurations for
controlling visibility and displaying part styles in assemblies. I discuss
Display State options at length in this chapter.

Using Display States

Display States enable you to change visual properties more quickly than con-

figurations. Configurations save a lot of extra data if all you need is to hide or

show parts, and they can be slow to change from one to another, but you

can change between Display States almost instantaneously.

Assembly display states can also control part display states, and different

instances of a part in an assembly can use different display states.