SOLIDWORKS: Display States in Your SOLIDWORKS Drawings

Display States in Your SOLIDWORKS Drawings

This topic comes up from time to time on tech support where a customer would like to show a drawing view with some components shaded and some in hidden lines. A good way to accomplish this is to use Display States. Display States are created added through the Configuration Manager tab, by right clicking, and choosing Add Display State.

Upon creation, this new Display State is active and any visual change or added appearance is automatically saved. In this example, let’s make the canopy wireframe so we can see the internals of the frame. Expand the Display Pane by clicking the “>” symbol at the top right corner for the Feature Manager. Find the component you’d like the modify and change the Component Display settings. This can also be accomplished by right clicking the component in the graphics window and choosing Component Display.

After the change, the assembly contains both Shaded with Edges and Wireframe components.

Now that we have our Display State defined, let’s show this in a drawing view.  As you can see, we’ve added a drawing view, selected the desired Display State but the drawing view is only showing Hidden Lines Removed.

To show the Display State, we need to change the Display style to either Shaded or Shaded with Edges. With this quick change, we have what we need in our view.

If there’s ever a time that you’d like to show a mixed Display Style in your drawings, you know how to do it.

Kris Dubuque
Field Services Technical Manager
Computer Aided Technology