Get Your Money’s Worth from the SolidWorks FeatureManager

Many of us use Solidworks all day every day, and yet there are some rather simple things that we can still learn about the software that would make our every day tasks just a little bit easier. The FeatureManager is one of those things about which you might be missing something. Let’s take a look. Fore brevity sake I’ll split this into the Part FeatureManager and the Assembly FeatureManager in two separate posts.

FeatureManager Filter

The first place we find a payoff is with the filter bar. You can very quickly find features, parts and mates that you are looking for by typing in part of the name. Of course this depends on you naming the important new features and parts in your parts and assemblies. If you’re not using the FeatureManager Filter, you’ll be surprised at how useful it is the first time you get results. You may even be more careful to rename features in your parts. Did I mention it’s fast?

FeatureManager Splitter

Maybe not as immediately useful, but still a nice option is the FeatureManager Splitter. This is the bar with the little dot in the middle. When you put the cursor over it and pull down, you can split your FeatureManager in two. This allows you to see the top of the tree (planes and bodies folders) in one window and the bottom of the tree (mates) in the other.

It’s especially good if you have huge FeatureManager trees or if you have a small monitor.

Remember also that the Home and End keys will get you immediately to the top and bottom of the FeatureManager respectively.

Show Flat Tree View

Oh, how about this one. You know how Solidworks keeps reordering your sketches. Maybe you have a layout sketch at the top of the tree and accidentally use it in a feature. SW reorders it under a feature. Flat Tree Display will iron things out.

Flat Tree Display shows all of the features in the order in which they were created. Nothing is consumed under another feature, getting the parent/child thing out of order.

Don’t tell me I’m the only person who gets annoyed by this. Seeing all the features in a true-to-history-straight line really helps. You can always switch it back if you really want to see the (parent) sketch come after the (child) extrude feature, or you just really need to see those dependencies, but displaying the tree this way is really helpful to me. I’ll bet if you try it sometime you might like it too.

And just to make it that much nicer, there is even a hotkety to enable/disable Flat Tree View – Ctrl+T. Use it.

Display Pane

The Display Pane, for those of you who aren’t yet obsessed with it, is that panel that flies out from the right of the FeatureManager. If you find yourself hiding and showing things frequently, or needing to change color, transparency or even display styles (wireframe/shaded), the Display Pane can help you see the current state of thins and allows you to change settings immediately. It is especially useful if you work with multibody surface or solid models a lot. And spoiler alert, it also works great in the assembly.

The hotkey C will expand/collapse the entire flyout FeatureManager. This can be useful when you need to select something from the flyout, then access something behind it in the graphics window.

The shortcut F8 will instantly hide or show the pane for you, in case you’re worried about taking up valuable graphics space. And of course you remember that F9 will hide/show the entire FeatureManager, F10 hides/shows toolbars and F11 takes the graphics window full-scream, right? Anyway, very useful reminders.

If you hover the cursor over a body in the graphics window, you can press TAB and hide whatever body is being hovered over. Likewise, you can hover and press Shift+TAB to show the body again. While we’re at it, Ctrl+Shift+Tab will temporarily show all of the hidden solid or surface bodies (or components in an assembly). Great visualization options.

History Folder

The History Folder is found right under the name of the part in the FeatureManager. It has a list of the most recent FeatureManager items you have selected or used. You can set (via RMB menu) how many features you want to see in this list.

You can do everything with the items in this list that you can do with the items in their normal place in the FeatureManager (except drag to reorder). You can even right click on a feature to roll it back and roll the tree to the end. If you work with parts that have long trees, this kind of thing can be very useful.

Hidden Tree Items

Do you ever feel like the top of the tree is getting laden with stuff you never use? Sensors. Annotations. Body Folders. Who needs ’em? You can hide these things.

Tools/Options/FeatureManager will allow you to put the kabosh on junk you don’t use. Automatic only shows something if it has content. Show forces it to be shown regardless of content, and Hide of course hides the folder without question. This works in both part and assembly environments, and because it’s a System Option, it works for all the files on your computer.

FeatureManager Settings

There are several other useful FeatureManager settings.

Scroll selected item into view is particularly important when you have a lot of features in your FeatureManager. If you pick something in the graphics window that is off the screen in the FeatureManager, this setting will scroll the FM so you can see the feature.

And likewise, the Zoom to Selection from the FeatureManager will zoom the selected feature into graphics window for you automatically.

Arrow key navigation allows you to continue moving the rollback bar with the keyboard arrows. When you click back into the graphics window, the arrows go back to rotating the view.

The Transparent flyout FeatureManager is extremely valuable for making selections when the PropertyManager is covering over the normal FeatureManager.

Dynamic Highlight of course highlights faces and edges in the graphics window as your mouse travels over them.

The default hotkey Q will instantly show all of the planes in the model. The display goes back to normal when you click in the graphics window.

Another default hotkey is Shift+C which instantly collapses all the expanded items in the FeatureManager.

The Freeze Bar

Be honest. You forgot about the Freeze Bar, didn’t you. The Freeze Bar is that fuzzy yellow bar that sits at the top of the tree that you can roll down and lock features from the top down. Just like the rollback bar rolls up from the bottom. Frozen features have little locks on them. Anything frozen in this way should not update or change. This is one (artificial) way to keep a model from changing.

This feature can actually be disabled, but this setting isn’t where you think it should be. You’re thinking it should be at Tools/Options/FeatureManager, right? Nope. It’s at Tools/Options/General. Go figger, amirite?

If you right click on the Freeze bar, you can unfreeze everything in a single shot. You can also hie all part rebuild indicators (traffic lights on features in the FeatureManager).

Summary

So what’s the count? How many new tricks do you learn about the FeatureManager? Time well spent? Be back tomorrow for more? Bookmark? Leave a comment?

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