[Video Transcript]
As you may or may not know, it’s possible to create watermarks in a SOLIDWORKS drawing such that you can see whether the document is ready for manufacture. It could, however, be the case that manufacture is done directly from the model, in this case it can be a good idea to create a watermark within your part or assembly files, too. This is how to do it.
How to display watermarks in a SOLIDWORKS model
I’m going to create a custom property called a watermark and set the value to ‘In Progress – Do not Manufacture’ and press ‘OK’. The next thing we have to do is activate the 2D notes area annotation view. Then we insert a note and link it to the watermark property. I’ll also adjust the size and colour of the note, too. As you can see, we can take the note and move it around, and if we reorient our model, you’ll see the note move with it, which is not ideal.
To finish the process, we right-click and toggle the watermark option on.
At this point, we get some additional controls available in the note property manager where we can control whether the note sits on top of. or behind our geometry, and also transparency controls for the note, too. Because the note has been set up as a watermark note, you’ll notice that regardless of the orientation of my model the note occupies the same space on the screen and I cannot move the note around. Also, I can only make changes to the value of the note if I am in the 2D notes area annotation view. So, let’s activate a different annotation view and you can see it’s not possible to edit the note.
At the point where we are ready to manufacture, we need to change the value of the watermark property to blank. I could go into the file properties to do this, but to speed things up, I’ve created a property tab builder with watermark property inside. This watermark property is based on a list so I can very quickly switch between do not manufacture and empty.
Bonus tip: If you are using SOLIDWORKS PDM you can automate the value of the watermark property based on what workflow state the file is in.
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