Why Components Are Missing in Composer?

As a SOLIDWORKS user when you improve efficiency on the product, you tend to create complex models and larger assemblies. When these larger assemblies are opened in SOLIDWORKS Composer they show some unexpected but intended behaviour. One of them is components missing in assembly.

In the below example its evident that components are missing

Following are the possible reasons for this:

1. The components are in hidden state. Notice some components are un-ticked that means they are hidden.

2. Next when you try to tick those components they cannot be selected.

This is because of the way files are translated in Composer. Whenever SOLIDWORKS opens a large assembly based on the settings it opens in Large Assembly Mode or components are set to ‘Lightweight’. For a proper translation of file in Composer it requires fully resolved data/file. Hence these LightWeight components are not visible or accessible in Composer.

Large Assembly Mode has an advantage of opening larger assemblies and improve performance. However while translating file from SOLIDWORKS we need to tamper some settings so that SOLIDWORKS doesn’t open assemblies in Large Assembly Mode. Below are those settings:

• Tools > Options > System Options > Performance > Disable “Automatically Load components lightweight.”
• Tools > Options > System Options > Assemblies > “Use Large Assembly Mode to improve performance when the assembly contains more than this number of components”. Here you can either increase the threshold or disable this option.

Note: Once the files are translated properly in Composer reset these settings.

Mithilesh Kapre,

Application Engineer,

Central Innovation, Australia

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