The 3D Pub

Smart Template Technology (STT) is a very important technology for QuadriSpace users and provides an incredible jump start to many historically tedious documentation tasks. This blog post will provide a short overview of this important technology so that you can use it on your next project. Although this was introduce in our 2009 version with Service Pack 2, many customers are still unaware of the power of this important capability.

Smart Template Technology is the key to 15 minutes animations, like this! Without STT, after creating an exploded view, each view would have to be created manually.

In the previous example, we created an animation of an assembly process. The user steps were to (1) create an exploded view, (2) setup a “template image” (3) use the Storyboard Wizard (based on STT) to generate views and (4) tweak the resulting views. To most users, the unknown part of this is step (3) which automatically creates views. How does this work?

Smart Template Technology - Click to zoom

So, as a user of Publisher3D or Pages3D, there are a few things that you should seek to accomplish at each step diagrammed above.

(Estimated time in animation example – 7 minutes)

Creating an exploded view is the first step. The strategy here is to create an exploded view that has steps in the correct order. If you are creating an assembly process, then the steps can be in the opposite order because there  is an option to “Reverse Steps” during when using the Storyboard Wizard. You can review and adjust the order of the steps by using the “Exploded View Panel” (shown in the graphic above).

Another thing to consider here is that you can allow parts to overlap physically. There is a Storyboard Wizard option to hide the parts until they are needed. This can result in better generated images. In standard exploded views, parts can be significantly distant because other parts are in between. In animation (especially an assemble process) animation, all of the parts may never be visible together in an exploded state.

(Estimated time in animation example – 3 minutes)

An image template is really just a fancy way of saying set up the view in Publisher3D. After you create the exploded view, it is important to get the view set up the way you want it BEFORE running the Storyboard Wizard. This is because the settings that you make to the view will propagate through all illustrations that are created. This includes setting a viewpoint, the desired render style, a ground plane, shadows, reflections and any other view property that you want all generated illustrations to have. Keep in mind that this can be tweaked after the illustrations are generated too.

(Estimate time in animation example – 1 minute)

This is a simple step. Simply activate the “Storyboard Wizard” command and STT will do most of the rest for you. There are a few options that you can select during the wizard that will determine the results you get. For example, when we created the assembly process, we made sure to select the “Reverse Steps” option so that our automatically created illustrations would end up in the correct order.

(Estimated time in animation example – 4 minutes)

This is the result. After this is created, you are free to modify each individual illustration, change the transitions between illustrations (for assembly I like “Accel 2 Reverse”), change viewpoints, change render styles per illustration, add markups, add meta data to each illustration, etc.

There are many things that can be done with a storyboard in QuadriSpace products. The example so far just shows a simple and rapidly created animation that was published as an AVI for uploading to YouTube.

What’s Next?

In a blog soon, I will expand on this Power Supply project to (1) add metadata to each illustration and publish a set of images to Word and then (2) begin working with this storyboard in Pages3D to show how the storyboard can be reused to create interactive 3D documents or rapidly add images to pages in a document.