We're back with our next set of PPX Tips & Tricks! Our goal is to share some of the shortcuts and helpful hints when creating design project presentations with CATIA Product Perception Experience. 

Fast open of the Preferences panel

The settings to control the behavior of the PPX features are grouped in a dedicated Preferences page. It can quickly be accessed by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P or by clicking the rightmost icon in the Action Bar.
While the Preferences panel is open, you can try and apply any settings, both in Authoring and Presentation mode. 

Generate the Viewpoint variants matching all found cameras

If the product you insert contains cameras, they will be listed under the Cameras node in the Project tree. Simply right-click this node and select the command Create Viewpoint Variant Line: it generates a new Variant panel with a new Variant line made of Viewpoint variants matching each cameras.

Creating a presentation template 

Well, let’s face it, there is no official template feature (yet). So here is how to create a PPX presentation that could be re-used as a template.

1. Insert the physical product of a model that is representative of the kind of design projects you work on
2. Insert the resources and assets usually required to review such design in different situations: 360° ambiences, human avatars, 3D props...
3. Set these resources and assets relatively to the loaded model: radius and position of the of the ambiences, position and postures of the avatars, position and scaling of the props...
4. Create the context variant lines necessary to reproduce different review situations, including one or more Viewpoint variants lines to hold the standard point of views to go through during a review session
5. Remove the model
6. Save the presentation, to be used now as a template

Then, when preparing a design project presentation or review session:

1. Load this PPX presentation template
2. Insert the model to present or review
3. Create the variants required to explore the model variations
4. Save as New (see Tips & Tricks issue 3) 

Playing different animations simultaneously: viewpoint, simulations, postures...

Simply gather the animated variants in a same stage. That stage, when activated, will start all the animations at the same time. Each animation will last as defined by its Duration property (for kinematics and physics simulation results) or by the variant's Animation Duration value (for Viewpoint, Position and Human variants).

For example, let's imagine we have 2 stages:

• Stage 1 starts a slow 20-sec viewpoint animation + a fast 1-sec move of a human arm reaching a button on a dashboard
• Stage 2 starts a 5-sec folding kinematics of the steering wheel + a 1-sec move of the human arm going back to a relax position

Once stage 1 has been activated, stage 2 can be activated to see the steering wheel folding and the arm moving back while the viewpoint animation from stage 1 keeps ongoing...

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