Electrical Design Software | Elecdes Design Suite by Scada Systems Ltd

How to Make 3D Blocks

General

Paneldes allows you to have a 3D block representation of most Paneldes components. However Paneldes only has default label blocks which do not model any of the geometry of the component. You may wish to create more detailed blocks for your components. The procedure below explains the necessary steps.

Procedure

  1. Create a new drawing in AutoCAD.

  2. Choose the units you are going to draw the block in. e.g. If you choose millimetres and the component is 100mm wide then you would make your block 100 drawing units wide.

  3. Draw the 3D representation of your component making sure that the front face of the component is on the WCS X-Y plane. The Z-axis of WCS should point out of the front face of the component. The origin in WCS will be the bottom left corner of the front of the component.

  4. Set the INSBASE system variable to be 0,0,0

  5. Add any attributes that you wish the block to display. For example, you could add the TAGNAME attribute, LOCATION attribute or CLASS etc. Take a look at some of the blocks in the MET_PNL_BLOCKS or IMP_PNL_BLOCKS directory inside your EDS directory for an example of this.

  6. Set the UCS to World.

  7. Save the file in the MET_PNL_BLOCKS directory for metric users and IMP_PNL_BLOCKS directory for imperial users.

  8. You are now ready to use the file with Paneldes.


See How to Insert 3D Blocks.