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Overview Creating Images in Catia

Frequently I get the question how to create an image from the design in the CATPart or the CATProduct. For some unknown reason the corressponding functionality has been neglected during the training. There are also a lot of questions about settings and image file types. Therefore let us take a look at the issue.

Image Functionality in Catia

You find the function to create pixel and vector images under the menue Tools>Image>Capture. After you have had created images, you can look and organize them with the menue Tools>Album.

Limitations

When you create an image in Catia you define a rectangle frame. The part of the geometry and the specification tree inside the frame will be included in the image but not any opened panels or visualization of functionality symbols. If you need this kind of images, e.g. to describe the way to use Catia, you will need another software.
A possibility would be to start a Window product, for example PowerPoint and use Insert>Screenshoot and execute an image in the application Catia. After the execution you can copy & paste the image where you want to.
An excellent software to create images is SnagIt, which offers powerful qualified options. We can recommend it.

Procedure

To execute an image you procede as follow:

Zoom in and pan the geometry as needed
Select the Menue Tools>Image>Capture. The capture panel will appear.
Select file type icon, pixel (A) or vector (B)
Select the Arrow icon
Define the rectangle frame
Select the Capture icon (red spot)

The image is executed and appears after some seconds in the panel Capture Preview. You can now erase, save, print and copy the image.
Attention: To be able to continue with another image, you have to erase the active image from the panel. Click the first icon (the red cross).

Pixel or Vector Image

You can choose between pixel and vector images.This is done by selecting one of the icons at the right in the Capture panel.

A pixel image is a defintion based on small spots. The accuracy is defined by resolution for example 72 dpi. This means that if you increase the size of the image it will appear less accurate. As a guideline newspapers have normally 150 dpi and high quality books images have 300 dpi. For the web resolutions around 100 dpi are common.

A vector image uses all wireframe elements of the geometry and computes the corresponding vectors. These images are scaleable without any quality losses but visualizate only the wireframe and not the shaded faces of the parts.

Pixel File Formats

When the image is saved a great number of file types are offered, e.g.:

*.bmp windows bitmap file type adopted to Windows products, small file size but also poor quality by shaded faces
*.jpg adopted to photos and gives a good result by shaded faces
*.tif high performance images but with big file size

Cheese!Thomas