SolidWorks 2011: 3 favorites, no, 4
I think if you were to skip a release (in addition to 2008) in the last 10 years, SW2011 one would be the one to skip. But not for the reason you might be expecting. This release doesn’t suck, but at the same time, there is little to recommend it. To me, this is is an uneventful release. This is both good and bad news. It’s good news because they didn’t play alphabet soup with the interface again (aside from standardizing some icons, which is a good thing). It’s bad news if you were hoping for some real modeling enhancements like Conic sketch elements and Freeze the feature tree.
Here are the few enhancements that I found most compelling when reading the What’s New for 2011:
“Surface Extrudes From a 2D or 3D Face”
The ambiguous tech writers at SW have struck again – you know, the ones who never tell you what you can’t do, even if that information is really the defining key of the function. You can already extrude a surface from a 2D or 3D face. The thing you can’t do, what this feature is talking about is extruding the 2D or 3D face itself. Even after reading the What’s New, it took me a while to figure that out. The thing they don’t say here is that this technique cannot be used when extruding a sketch. Yes. I’m serious. So this is on my list of favorites, but that is assuming that leaving out sketches from the list of things you can extrude was a simple oversight which will be corrected by SP5.
Anyway, on with the feature. Lets assume you have one of these egg carton surfaces, cuz honestly, who doesn’t. And you want to extrude it or a portion of it. So you make a split line in it, pre-select the face to extrude (alt-select if it is a planar face you want to extrude instead of a sketch), establish an extrusion direction with a plane or axis, and voila.
You can cap the end, delete the original and knit the result. Now honestly, these three options shown at the bottom of the PropertyManager are only displayed if you have the right combination of things selected. The options would be pretty useful if they were available to regular sketched extrudes, which make up 99% of extruded surfaces. You can already make this type of geometry with a Ruled Surface, so extruding from a 3D surface is no new capability, really. The new stuff is utterly hamstrung because it can’t be used with sketched extrudes. This feature gets the “WTF” award for 2011. It saves you a bunch of steps, but only if you extrude without sketching. Ayy.
Ok, on to the next favorite.Reusing Curves. Are you serious?!? We can reuse curves now?!? Here, take a look:
Our ever present egg carton had a curve projected on it, and a sweep was made using the curve as a path. Sweep paths are the primary use of curves, at least for me. I should note right here, that even if the rest of this experiment goes south, SW did fix one thing: The curve is now hidden after it is absorbed by the sweep feature. It never did that before. Kudos. Next I want to loft from the circle to the curve. This should test the reusability.
PWNED
Ok, busted. Sorry. It sounded so good in the What’s New, I almost believed them.
Oh well, we’ve got one more. New end conditions for revolve features.
The main thing you’re not going to believe here is that it actually works, so I don’t have much else to say except “thanks”. This one has been a long time coming, and now that it’s here, I think many people will welcome it as if it had always been there.
Next is the Show Model Colors In Drawing.
This is one I’ve wished for for several years. Not that I do a lot of drawings, just that every other part of the software is in color, but drawings are so, well, so… black and white. How 1960′s. Anyway, it’s in there now and it works.
Congratulations, SolidWorks. There were 4 things I was interested in for this release, and 2 of them work.
Some people will think that I’ve been plotting this post for the whole beta period, but I just sat down to write it and discovered some of these new functions aren’t very useful within the 30 minutes it took to write it. I hadn’t even tried the functionality until now. I guess I just expected it to work. Naive optimism will get you every time.
So what’s in this new release for folks who want geometry creation tools? Not much. The thing is that SolidWorks has become so huge, and they are distributing the same number of enhancements over much more software than they used to have, so the enhancements for any one field are probably very small. I only found interest in the “Parts and Features” heading of the What’s New. That’s one heading of 30 some. The topics with the most changes (gaged by lines in the What’s New PDF table of contents) were Drawings & Detailing, Enterprise PDM, and Simulation. All of those areas are certainly worthy, because people use them, and I don’t grudge enhancements that other areas got, just that my pet area got precious few.
On the other hand, many users have been asking for changes to be scaled back, and for bug fixes to take a front seat. Who knows. Maybe they are listening.