Subassembly Composer is a Reality

The labs pre-release version has been inoperative for only a scant couple of weeks before we have a fully functional permanent version.  Create your own intelligent subassemblies WITHOUT needing to have a PhD in Visual Basic coding.  Read on and stay tuned for further posts in the near future.

Today is Blogger Day and that means that we bloggers, you’ll see this same post in various other blogs today, have access to the software a short while before you do so we can all spread the hype.

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I was lucky enough to have a little time to try out the Labs version and it was pretty cool indeed.  Not fully functional, but very nice and quite simple to use.  Here are some items of note that may be different from the preview edition.

  1. There is a limitation for users who have Vault installed and who use Civil 3D 2011.  .NET 4.0 must be installed and that breaks the Vault add-in to Civil 3D.
  2. It comes in two flavours.
    a) The Subassembly Composer.
    b) The Subassembly Composer Support Pack.  If you will be using a subassembly created with the Composer, you need to install this on computers without the Subassembly Composer installed.
  3. PKT’s you created with the pre-release Labs version will be upgraded to the new version once opened with the new Composer.
  4. There is an interesting new type of control; a Switch.  It’s similar to a visibility parameter in a dynamic block.
  5. The online help file is actually quite informative.  It contains PKT samples and example data.
  6. Curves can be used.  They are tessellated once defined, but they are defined as curves.  You can even define a parabola.
  7. Daylight rounding links.
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  8. Embed a Marked Point within your subassembly that maintains its position relative to one of your subassembly point codes.
  9. Add a fillet between two links.  Again, it will be tessellated when used in the assembly.
  10. Use Auxiliary geometry to generate points and links that are not included in the final subassembly geometry, but can be used to create other geometry elements.  This will prove to be a very powerful tool, I’m sure.
  11. Conditions are supported.   Not exactly like the built-in conditional subassemblies, but similar.
  12. Output parameters are supported.
  13. Store a variable and use it later in the subassembly workflow.
  14. Messages can be reported to the Event Viewer.
  15. Superelevation is supported.
  16. Shape codes are now supported.
  17. Assign a help file and image to each subassembly.

3 comments

  1. […] video HERE or Cyndi’s blog post HERE, or even those folks over there at Civil4d.com HERE (Matt Kolberg to be […]

  2. Shane Matt says:

    What are the limitations between vault and 2011. Do these still exist with 2012?

  3. Matt Kolberg says:

    I don’t believe that problem exists for Vault with 2012. The limitation with Vault and 2011 is that if you install SC, Vault will cease to work properly.