Electrical Design Software | Elecdes Design Suite by Scada Systems Ltd

How to Explode a 3D Panel into a General Arrangement

General

Paneldes can take an existing 3D panel and explode it so that all the plates of the panel are laid out flat, similar to a 2D drawing. You may then construct your components on the exploded plates of the panel and when finished, rebuild the panel back into a 3D model along with all the components you placed in 2D.

Currently this technique will only work on a model with a single panel frame.

Procedure

  1. To explode the panel into 2D, choose the Explode Panel entry from the General Arrangement menu.

    • The panel will be exploded into 2D and you will be switched to the General Arrangement layout.

      You will see that each plate in the panel has been given a unique viewport. In some cases there may be more than 1 plate in a viewport. This can occur when, for example, you have two doors on the front of a panel.

    • If you use the Zoom Extents function, each plate will be zoomed to fit the viewport to which it has been assigned.

    • You can move the viewports to new positions if you wish.

    • Once you have exploded a panel and plates, you can move the plates and Paneldes will still be able to rebuild the panel into 3D.

    • Each viewport contains a label of the tagname of the plate that it has been assigned.

    • You can place items on the exploded plates using the same method as used in 3D but you will always be looking directly at the plate when placing items. This makes positioning items easier.

Note:

If a device is assigned to a plate and exploded, any modular sub components of the device may not remain with the device (if they are not close enough to be considered as mounted on the same plate). You should accommodate this in your design.

See Also

There are many settings that can be configured for Exploding and Rebuilding Panels. See the Paneldes Preferences for a list of these settings and how to configure them.