Creating Assembly Views and Sheets

You can create assembly views and assembly sheets for an assembly type, but these drawings are always associated with a particular instance of the type, and only one instance of a type can have assembly views. If that instance of the assembly is deleted from the project (or disassembled), all associated assembly views are deleted as well. If necessary, you can change the instance the views are associated with using the Acquire Views tool.

Aside from annotations, assembly detail views contain only those elements that make up the assembly instance. You can add annotations to an assembly view, rotate it, and edit the assembly itself by adding or removing elements.

You specify the particular views you want and other parameters in the Create Assembly Views dialog, which you can access in either of the following ways:

• Select an instance of the assembly type in a project view, and then click Modify | Assemblies tab Assembly panel Create Views.
  Note: The Create Views option is not available if assembly views already exist for a different instance of the same type.
• Select an assembly type in the Project Browser, right-click, and click Create Assembly Views. In this case, the views will be associated with the assembly instance that was created first, and the Create Views tool will not be available for other instances selected in a project view.

In the Create Assembly Views dialog, you select the types of views you want, select the desired scale, and (if Sheet is selected) specify titleblock information. When you click OK, the views are added to the Assemblies category in the Project Browser under the assembly type name. The settings you specified in the Create Assembly Views dialog will be the default settings the next time you open this dialog for this project.

Note: The 6 different elevations available in the Create Assembly Views dialog (Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front, Back) represent the views from each side of a conceptual box enclosing the assembly. Each pair of opposite sides of the box is parallel to one of the 3 orientation planes of the assembly origin, which you can edit to change the orientation of the assembly in relation to the project orientation. See Editing Assemblies.

Assembly views always remain associated with the assembly instance for which they were created. If an edit to an assembly instance causes the instance to change from one assembly type to another, any assembly views belonging to the edited instance will be listed under the project browser node for the new assembly type. If the type you changed to already has assembly views, an error message informs you that one set of views will be deleted.

If you create additional section views within an assembly view, they inherit the assembly view's relationship to the assembly instance.

To place an assembly view on a sheet

1. In the Project Browser, under Assemblies, expand the node for the assembly type, and double-click the name of the sheet.
2. Drag the desired detail view from the Project Browser onto the open sheet view, and release the mouse button to display an outline of the detail view.
3. Move the cursor to position the outline as desired, then click to place the view on the sheet. To change the orientation of the assembly within the view, you need to open that assembly view, select the crop region, and use the Rotate tool on the Modify panel.
   Note: You can also place drafting views and other kinds of project views on assembly sheets.

   After views have been placed on a sheet, you can expand the sheet's node in the Project Browser to see the list of views.

If you want to place the same view on more than one sheet for the same assembly, right-click the view name in the Project Browser, and click Duplicate View. For more information, see Duplicating a Detail View. Note that assembly views can also be placed on normal (non-assembly) sheets.