2D drawings communicate manufacturing requirements, data for patent protection, assembly instructions, and much more. The ability to create 2D drawings that fully document your design and being able to do it quickly and predictably is a requirement.
Templating System
Standardize and automate. Choose from built-in ANSI, ISO, and JIS templates or create your own to your company's standards. Properties of the template apply to every drawing that uses it, so things like dimension options, text size, callout styles and more automatically apply drawing-wide. Also automate the population of design data into the title block or other areas in the drawing.
Exploded Views & Callouts
Perfect for assembly instructions, manuals, documentation, and much more. Exploded views demonstrate the relationships of the components to the viewer and show the intended assembly order.
Exploded views defined in the 3D workspaces can be shown in 2D drawings alongside a bill of materials. Callout balloons visually link the parts to a line item in the BOM. Show the exploded view in a traditional drafting style or in a shaded style.
View Styles
Choose from the traditional drafting style or beautiful shaded views. Mix and match styles as needed to most clearly convey the design intent and specifications.
Hidden Lines
Reveal hidden lines to document internal structures or otherwise obscured details. Toggle hidden line visibility for each view with a click.
Layers
A customizable layer system allows you to define the color, stroke pattern, and weight of figures and annotations. Change the appearance of standard figure types such as Hidden Line, Center Line, or Visible drawing wide, or create new layer styles and apply them to anything.
Standard Views
The start of any drawing is the creation of a standard view. Typically a standard view uses principal projection planes to represents something like Front, Top, or Right, but can include isometric views or any custom angle.
A drawing showing the 10 standard views
Section Views
Regular Section Views
Regular section views cut a part or multiple parts along the defined cutting plane to give visibility to hidden features and to display how multiple parts fit together. They are used when hidden lines or other methods are not suitable.
Detailing one or more cross sections is often the best way to fully describe the geometry of a model.
Aligned Section Views
An aligned section view is defined with multiple non-parallel cutting planes. It is primarily used when the section view must pass through multiple features that are not in line with each other.
In this example, two cutting planes are defined so the section view can pass through the full range of important features.
Removed Section Views
A removed section view is used to detail cross sections of a model. The result is a 0-thickness slice along the section plane.
Removed section views are ideal when the primary objective is to detail a cross-sectional profile and nothing else.
Broken Out Section Views
A broken out section view is used to peer through the model to reveal what is underneath. It is similar to creating an extrude cut. Define a profile and the cut depth.
In this example, we've created a spline and defined a cutting depth that reveals the internal components.
Auxiliary Views
Auxiliary views help to detail inclined or oblique features. They show the true size and shape of features that may be at an angle to the default projection planes.
Detail Views
Detail views are used to show a portion of another view, usually enlarged, to more clearly detail dense areas of a drawing. Any figure can be used to define the boundary of a detail view.
Broken Views
Broken views make it possible to display long or large components at a larger scale in a drawing by removing portions of the view that add no value to detailing. Very long parts might otherwise be tedious or impossible to detail on a single sheet.
Multiple extension line styles are available and the gap width is easily customized.
Partial views
Partial views are used to save space in a drawing. A boundary can be drawn on any view and then converted to a partial view.
Only geometry within the boundary is shown in the resulting partial view.
Bill of Materials & Callouts
Insert a dynamically updating Bill of Materials into a drawing to show a wide variety of line-item information about components in an assembly. Create balloon callouts to tie components on the drawing to the BoM table.
Hole Callouts & Pattern Lines
Holes made in the 3D model have callouts automatically applied in 2D and pitch circle diameter and linear pattern references can be applied. Complete manufacturing callouts update automatically if the holes change.
Holes and Cosmetic Threads
A wide variety of hole types are available, and cosmetic threads can be shown automatically along with a full visual representation in shaded views.
Dimensions
Many types and styles of dimensions are available to ensure succinct and compliant communication of design intent.
Regular Dimension
The most common dimension type shows the distance or angle between two figures.
Ordinate Dimension
The zero line is defined and other dimensions reference their offset from the baseline.
Chamfer Dimension
The chamfer edge and two reference edges are selected and the Chamfer Dimension is applied.
Gapped Dimension
Any dimension can have gapped dimension lines and extension lines.
Dual Dimension
Show any or all dimensions in multiple units as needed.
Styles
Create custom styles for dimensions and apply them consistently.
Pushing Data to a Drawing
Data used in the design or description of 3D parts and assemblies can be automatically and dynamically inserted into a drawing using Data Fields. Any default or custom data field can be inserted.
User Input Fields
Defining a User Input Field in a drawing template allows you to manually fill in the desired data consistently across many drawings. The value of the User Input Field populates the drawing at the defined location.
Data Fields
2D Data Fields populate from data or properties of a 3D model. During 3D model creation, you will fill out various data fields such as Vendor, Material, Cost Center, etc. Or, you can make your own custom data fields.
Selecting the Cost Center Data Field to be inserted in a drawing.
Datum & Datum Targets
Create a Datum and Datum Targets to define how important geometric characteristics of a model should be measured during manufacturing.
These are some of the important Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) concepts for precision manufacturing and model creation.
An example showing three Datum Features (A, B, C) and corresponding datum targets.
Surface Finish
Surface finish symbols communicate the characteristics of various surfaces of the model, sometimes including roughness, waviness, and lay, and whether or not machining or material removal is allowed.
Typically engineers will specify surface finishes that are as coarse (easy, inexpensive) as possible that also still achieve the desired design parameters and usage profile.
Various surface finish examples and a drawing using surface finish symbols.
Tables
Create arbitrary 2D drawing tables of any size that you can manually populate with data. Tables can maximize clarity when many data points or combinations are needed.
Set the table to any layer to achieve the desired visual style and optionally export the table as a CSV file to open in other spreadsheet applications.
A table example showing various SKUs of the chair model based on a wood and finish combination.
Sheet Metal Flat Patterns
Sheet metal components are designed in 3D and encompass a wide variety of use cases. When you are ready to manufacture these components, the first step is to cut them out.
A flat pattern drawing of the sheet metal component provides the outline geometry for laser cutters or other manufacturing methods, as well as bend locations.
A sheet metal component projected as a 2D flat pattern for laser cutting.
Color Fill
Define areas of a drawing to manually fill with a color or hatch pattern. Adding color coding or pattern details to drawings can make a large difference in efficiency downstream when important manufacturing or assembly instructions need to be clearly communicated.
Manual Centerlines
Create centerlines between two edges when automatic centerline creation is not sufficient. Centerline chains can display centerlines through various model features.
Theoretical Intersection
Sometimes model features are most clearly communicated with theoretical intersections. Pick two figures and intersection lines are created. Dimension to the intersection point.
Weld Symbols
Insert weld symbols to annotate how welds are to be created and finished. Use with ANSI, ISO, and JIS weld callout styles.
Feature Control Frames
Feature control frames are a part of GD&T and are used to describe various types of tolerances such as concentricity, parallelism, perpendicularity, and more.
A feature control frame wizard makes it easy to create simple or complex FCF annotations.
Edge Tolerance
Edge tolerance annotations communicate the acceptable burr, undercut, or passing deviation amounts. Edge tolerances are often called out in several applications such as hydraulic equipment where specific tolerances are critical to the function.
