Would you use shade parts by Status?

matt_hardman

What if you could shade your assembly with a colour tag that conveys the part status? So you could define statuses such as:

• In Work
  
• Released
  
• Out for Manufacture
  
• Manufactured
  
• Assembled
  

Which would each correspond to a different colour.
Maybe if you could also filter your view (say to see all items that are In Work +Released +Out for manufacture)

You could take the entire thing a step further and start assigning lead times to these items. A standard part that you've dropped in but not ordered yet could have a lead time as suggested by the supplier. Your items and parts you would have to assign lead-times to. You could then shade the model by lead-time.

I've wanted to do this quite a few times, and I think it would help me a lot. Would anyone else use this feature?

Ben_

That sounds great. It would be a HUGE thing for me and some of my projects. Kinda a internet of things BOM. However I could see it being just as huge and hard to code in.

billy2

My vote is for:

• purchased parts
  
• machined parts
  
• waterjet parts
  
• printed parts
  
• purchased & modified parts
  

I guess different people want different things tracked. We all want a method for grouping bodies and performing visual operations on them.

lougallo

Would liken this to SW and their assembly visualization or the ability to visually control parts based on their properties.

kevin_quigley

Honestly not sure what benefit offers over "standard" colour tagging? Problem is I look at those lists above and think not many are applicable to me. I personally think if you need this sort of feature you could set up custom colours/tags and apply these to a part.

Having said that I can see a case for being able to tag parts with other data for inclusion into standard processes for development under ISO standards for example.

matt_hardman

You can already do this?

You can always choose to colour your parts whatever colour you want obviously, but the way I tend to work is (eventually) to have parts coloured by either their paint/coating colour, or something that is representative of the material that they're made from.

What I'm referring to is a way of tagging parts with a property value, and then viewing your assembly shaded in colours according to that property. But it sounds like you actually can do that in SW? I'm from CATIA mostly, sorry about that.

kevin_quigley

Yep...SolidWorks is pretty good with that stuff :-)

lougallo

We will watch this discussion to see what the real full scope of this type of visualization feature would include before I start adding improvements. Keep the ideas coming!