Engineering drawings are important for many reasons. Before you start to create a drawing, make sure a part or an assembly document is open for which you wish to create a drawing. To create these drawings, there's a specific workbench in Catia that you can use. The workbench is different and is nothing like AutoCAD. You can navigate and open the drafting workbench by using the path
Start > Mechanical Design > Drafting.
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| Opening drafting workbench |
Before the drafting workbench opens up, a dialogue box opens up, where you can choose to either open an empty sheet or predefined views as per selected standard. Within the same dialogue box you also get the option to modify the standard and set the sheet style. You can also open the drafting workbench using
Ctrl +N > Drawing, but in this case, you do not get the option to use preset views and can only define standards and create an empty drawing sheet.
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| New drawing and modify dialogue box |
Depending on the standard that you select, the projection method is defined for the drawing sheet (You can see the symbol in the New drawing creation dialogue box). And different views or an empty sheet will be created depending upon whether you select to create an empty sheet or the preset views, after you press OK. Below you can see one such drawing that was created using preset views from one of the active part. Preset views seldom create the drawing that we desire, so most of the time, we would end up using the empty sheet and moving from there onwards. The reason for this is that, all views are associated with front view of the part and we do not have an option to define the front view in this case. In the next section, we will see what are other methods for creating views.
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| Drawing created using preset views |
There are basically two ways in which you may create drawings, interactive drafting and generative drafting. The interactive drafting method is where you may strive to create part / assembly drawings, apply dimensions without the use of actual 3D parts and assemblies. This would involve making drawings using same tools that you used while making a sketch in the sketcher workbench, however, they have a different name here. In addition some other relevant tools are also used for creating dimensions etc. Below, you can see some of the tools that we would study in the drafting workbench.
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| Tools used in the drafting workbench |
Now using only interactive drafting would be like handicapping oneself and this is something that is almost never used since it slows down to an extent making the method almost impractical. Instead, we use Generative drafting with combination of tools from interactive drafting to make drawings. So, we generally create views using the parts and assemblies directly, and apply modifications and dimensions as per our standard or guidelines defined by organization you are working with.
