Sketching - What's new in SolidWorks 2015?

Sketching in SolidWorks 2015 - What's New - Part 1

ADDING CENTERLINES TO RECTANGLES

You can add centerlines when sketching a rectangle. In the PropertyManager, under Options, select Add construction lines as shown below.

Now you can select to add construction line either From Corner or From Midpoint as shown below.

The From Midpoints option is shown below.

The From Corners option is shown below.

CONVERING SPLINE TYPES

You can convert regular splines to style splines and vice versa. This is helpful when you want to sketch a spline by its through points, but then convert it to a style spline.

As shown below we have a regular spline that we want to convert to style spline.

We right click on the spline and select Convert to Style Spline option as shown below.

SolidWorks will show the Sketcher Confirm Conversion message for which we can say yes.

Shown below is the preview of Style spline with Curve degree set to 24.

We change the Curve degree to 6 and the result updates as shown below.

View Palette ( Additional Feature SolidWorks 2014)

View Palette can now show drawing views placed on drawings. After placing a drawing view on a drawing, the view persists in the View Palette and is identified with a drawing icon as shown below. In earlier versions of SolidWorks once the view is being placed on a drawing it did not show in the View Palette.

 

Additionally, the View Palette contains Dimetric and Trimetric views as shown below.

 

 

Since the views don’t disappear after being placed on drawing you can create multiple views in the same sheet like as shown below we have created another right view.

SolidWorks World 2014 Day 3 General Session

The Final session of SolidWorks world kicked off with Mark Schneider revealing the winners of 2014 Model Mania Contest, where attendees are presented with a  finished model and complete to see who recreate and analyze the model from scratch the fastest.

The SolidWorks Certification team took stage to announce some big news. In 2014 , SolidWorks is introducing three additional certifications:

• Certified SolidWorks Specialist - Mechanical Conceptual
• Certified SolidWorks Associate - Mechanical Conceptual
• Certified Specialist - 3D Experience Mechanical Conceptual

As of today SolidWorks have awarded over  100,000 certifications to user around the world.

Bruce Howley took the stage to reveal the results of the SolidWorks World 2014 TOP TEN List. After the end of voting period, the final results were as follows:

1. Auto-hide Components
2. Draw a line segment starting from mid-point
3. Equal spacing option for linear patterns
4. Ability to re-name part or sub-assembly in the feature tree
5. Unlimited undo/redo
6. Pressing the ESC key should immediately stop the current calculation and return control to the user
7. Fillets and chamfers should be managed by the same feature
8. Ability to flip angle dimensions after they have been placed
9. Hole callout should include all instances on the same face
10. New Purge command

They ended with a look of products team coming up for SolidWorks 2015. And with that Bertrand took the stage to thank the platinum sponsors: HP, Dell, NVIDIA. He also let eveyone know that next year , we'll be getting together in sunny Phoenix, Ariozona.

VIDEO: SolidWorks World 2014 Day 2 General Session

The second general session of SolidWorks World 2014 was all about the user community and customers. This past year, we had 14 new chapters for the SolidWorks User Group Network and over 800 people attending the SWUGN Summit events (they’re like miniature versions of SolidWorks World).

The general session kicked off with a customer presentation featuring eatART, an organization that ”fosters art research with a focus on large-scale, technically sophisticated art by supporting both independent and internal art projects,” led by Suchit Jain, Vice President of SolidWorks User Advocacy. Jonathan Tippett, founder of eatART, talked about their vision which was instrumental to the design of the Mondo Spider (demoed on stage yesterday).

Then, SolidWorks Usergroup   Network Leader Richard Doyle presented the SWUGN awards. That was followed up by more presentations from two amazing customers: MarkForged and BoDyn Bobsled.

Then, CEO Bertrand Sicot introduced the BoDyn team: Geoff Bodine and Bob Cuneo, who are behind the design of the Night Train 2 bobsled that the US team is taking to the 2014 Olympics next month in Sochi, Russia. Bertrand had an opportunity to visit with the team last year in Park City, Utah, and even got to take a ride down the track. He showed some video documenting the experience, and the team discussed what goes into designing a bobsled used in the winter games.

WATCH the SolidWorks World 2014 General  Session Day 2 video.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual First Look

At SolidWorks World 2014, the world got the first look at SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual.
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual is more than just a CAD tool, it delivers truly collaborative design environment that enables design teams, customers, and suppliers to communicate, work together (interact) and develop products whenever they want and where ever they are located.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual is built on four pillars

CONCEPTUAL -

This is one of the interesting and brilliant feature in SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. It allows you to see how the design would move and interact in a dynamic way giving you the ability to get much deeper insight as compared to a static sketch.Most concepts start as 2D sketches, involving multiple parts in one sketch, SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual minimizes rework with intuitive 2D to 3D tools that feature automatic mapping of sketch relations into assembly mates and motion drivers.

INSTINCTIVE -

Most concepts start as 2D sketches, involving multiple parts in one sketch, SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual minimizes rework with intuitive 2D to 3D tools that feature automatic mapping of sketch relations into assembly mates and motion drivers.

SOCIAL -

SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual uses familiar social collaboration tools in an interactive environment to harness the collective intelligence of your company, customers, and vendors. By creating online communities you can assemble the complete design story in one location — design requirements, concepts, and decisions from all key stakeholders — capturing the collective intelligence of your entire community to improve your design.

CONNECTED -

Mechanical Conceptual enhances collaboration by automatically saving design iterations to keep data safe and up-to-date. You design data is saved to a secure online collaborative space allowing you to connect, access and work on concepts anywhere at any time.



To know more about SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual read this post

VIDEO:SolidWorks World 2014 General Session Day 1

SolidWorks Worls kicked off yesterday morning with a nearly 6000 people gathered together to celebrate their love for engineering and design.

With over 2.3 million users and counting around the world, the SolidWorks community is the biggest in the 3D CAD industry. Bertrand discussed his belief in “inspired people create inspired designs,” and the idea that the community is what makes the company and the products so powerful.

Bertrand went to announce two new products SolidWorks Inspection and eDrwaings Meeting. He also talked about My.SolidWorks.com, the new community website launched last year.

The SolidWorks team has also been working on new products built on the Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. For those of you unfamiliar with the 3D experience platform, it is a cloud-based service that enables 6 services:

• Search
• Tagging
• Collaborative Sharing
• Messaging
• Cloud Storage
• Live dashboarding capabilities

It integrates seamlessly with SolidWorks, to make your design experience the best possible. And we are now offering the first SolidWorks application available on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform: SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. The new SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual platform resides on four basic pillars: instinctive, conceptual, social and connected. All of this was made possible by the research and development team at Dassault Systemes and SolidWorks.

Check out the video on SolidWorks 2014 General Session Day 1.