Using the Display Pane

The Display Pane is that little panel that flies out of the side of the FeatureManager using the double arrow icon at the upper right corner of the FeatureManager. If you are not using it, and you are using either SolidWorks 2008 or 2009, you’re really missing out. With the new Appearances functionality, the Display Pane becomes more important than ever.

You can use the Display Pane in parts as well as assemblies. The image above shows what it does in an assembly. The four columns are:

  1. Hide/Show
  2. Display Style (shaded/wireframe)
  3. Appearance (plus overrides)
  4. Transparency
You can control the settings right from the icons in the Display Pane. The implementation of this has improved over the course of the last couple of releases, but I think one thing could still be improved. For example, when you click in the Transparency column, you get a small popup with a single icon on it. If it has only a single icon, and the icon is not different from the column header, why do you need it at all? It is just a useless step. It would be better if just clicking in the column changed the setting. If there was a choice of what to apply the tranparency to, or what level of transparency to apply, then it would be a different story. The same thing happens for the Hide/Show:

 

 

 

If you haven’t yet made peace with the term “Appearances”, you need to in order to move forward with the new versions of the SolidWorks software. It’s a little clumsy, but it works. Appearances combine Colors and Textures. Appearances can be applied to Materials, appearances are not the same as materials. Materials include both mass property type data and Cosmos, er, SolidWorks Simulation data.

In assemblies you have the ability to use Display States. Some people still don’t know this, so let me just say it. If you are still using Configurations to control Hide/Show states, colors, transparency, and display styles, you need to stop doing that right now. Use Display States for stuff like that. Really. Configurations bloat the file size, plus they are slow to change.Display States change almost immediately. If all of this is new to you, you also need to look into the Isolate command as well. This is really nice functionality added in recent releases, and you need to know it.

Ok, all of that was for assemblies, but most of it also applies to multibody parts.

This image is of a multibody part showing bodies with different transparency, color, displaystyle, even a feature color, and reference geometry being hidden or shown. Hidden/Shown bodies also can be seen and controlled through the display pane. The only functionality missing in multibody parts is Display States. You have all of the functionality that goes intoDisplay States including Isolate for bodies, but there is no way to create Display States for bodies.

The one thing the Display Pane does not include is face colors. In fact, SolidWorks 2009 sp0 still has some bugs related to changing the colors of faces. It appears that the folks developing it did not pay much attention to the existing ways of doing things when they created the new way of doing things. Just like the sketching favoring click-click over click-drag, the new Appearances functions favor dragging appearances from the Task Pane over changing face colors through the Appearances PropertyManager. So this implementation is not without its quirks.

Face colors are not represented in the Display Pane, and face colors changed through the Appearances PropertyManager cannot be removed in some cases (the Remove All Colors equivalent function is not always available when it should be). If they could remedy these two things, I would have unreserved support for this functionality.

So, if you’re not using the Display Pane, you need to be using it. It will save you time, and it makes understanding the color scheme much easier.

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