Using Saved Views

Have you ever deleted a feature or sketch entity, had Pro/ENGINEER reorient your view, and then want to get back to your original view? Do you spend a lot of time spinning, panning and zooming to see different views of what you are working on? If you often find yourself in these situations and you don’t use saved views, you are probably spending more time than necessary to orient your models. Saved views allow you to jump to earlier views without having to wait for intermediate orientations and repaints.

Previous Views

The simplest method is to get back to your original view is to use your previous view icon.

This useful tool does, however, have its limitations—the major one being that you can only go back to the last view orientation. If you have several orientations or took multiple steps to get where you are, the previous view will probably not get you back where you started. So something else is needed to help you jump from orientation to orientation.

Saved Views

Since view repaints can be a major portion of your wait time in a Pro/ENGINEER session, using the saved views functionality can augment your productivity. While having standard views such as top, right, and front are important, having what I call “working views” can save you even more time. When you save these working views, you can change your view back and avoid intermediate zooms and pans. Since you define these views on the fly, you can easily update them as areas of focus on your model change. Here’s how it works.

1. Take the example of creating a cut on a part, with the model viewed in the default orientation (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Default view of the part. The area where the design change is required is partially hidden.

2. To get a better view, zoom in and orient the model so that you can best see the area of concern (Fig. 2). At this point, use the saved view function and give it a name (v1).

Figure 2. Improved orientation.

3. As you go into sketcher, you may want to view the sketch normal to the sketch plane but you want to zoom in to the affected area. Hitting the sketch view icon orients correctly, but the zoom scale is wrong (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. The default sketch view does not get you to the desired zoom and/or pan.

4. Reorient your sketch view by panning and zooming until the desired result is obtained (Fig. 4). Save another view name (v2).

Figure 4. The sketch view is now oriented for sketching.

5. With these two views saved, you can switch between the 3D view and the sketch view without intermediate repaints.

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