Single Most Important Factor in Learning SolidWorks

Sometimes I browse through the SolidWorks forums trying to find some sort of common theme to write a blog post about. This blog is about 11 years old, and sometimes it gets hard to write new posts without duplicating stuff I’ve written about before. Anyway, the one thing I see happening a lot in the SW forum is that people feel compelled for some reason to ask questions about the most basic things. I don’t know how the demographic has changed in the last 22 years, whether it’s just younger people being exposed to SW for the first time, or if it’s somehow people lower on the CAD food chain who have been hold outs on 3D technology for this long, or what it is, but there is a difference. Certainly Youtube has changed things from a training point of view, because now you can be hose-fed bad ideas at an unbelievable rate. Not that everything on Youtube is a bad idea, but there is plenty of that. There are also a lot of great things on Youtube. To be certain, I definitely do a fair bit of research on blogs and Youtube, and I do learn a lot of stuff.

And there are other ways to learn. You can buy books, obviously. I think books are better as reference material than learning material, though. You’ve got to bring at least a basic understanding to one of my books.

There are reseller classes, which can be good, but they are pricey. I like online paid video stuff for learning the basics. They take you through stuff quickly, and you can watch over and over, and practice in between.

But what is the most important thing when someone wants to learn SolidWorks? Well, I think there are really 2 most important things, because the second one doesn’t work unless the first is in place. Let me tell you the second one first. The second most important thing is curiosity. If you are not curious, you’re not going to learn anything. An example of someone who is trying to learn but isn’t really curious is someone who is satisfying a class requirement. You’re not really interested in anything but the grade. You’ve got to be curious, like can’t sleep at night kind of curious, or falling in love kind of curious before you can really start learning. (I refuse to use the word “passionate” because it’s just overused and doesn’t mean what it used to mean any more).

The first thing, is that you have to give up your old prejudices. Cats who think Autocad defines CAD will never learn anything else, and will always miss the benefits of thinking a different way. These are the hardest people to teach SolidWorks, or any other CAD system (except ironically Synchronous Technology, which shares a lot of concepts with plain Jane 2D Autocad).

Curiosity means a couple of things. First, it means you have to try to figure out how something works. Part of understanding how it works is understanding what happens when it doesn’t work. When I tried to learn Solid Edge a few years ago, I was always fiddling around with stuff right at the border of works/doesn’t work. That gives you an idea of the boundary of stuff that you can expect the software to do. Let me tell you, that transition from SW to SE was easy in a lot of ways because they have so much in common, but it was also difficult because they have so much in common. Moving from Autocad to SW is easier because you just forget everything you know, and then learn SW. But moving between SW and SE you keep about 70% of what you know, but there are some basic concepts that are really different. How they handle sketches is different, the idea of SW’s configurations does not have a 1:1 equivalent in Edge.

In particular, it was really tough going from being a Works guru to being an Edge noob. I remembered back to when I was moving from Autocad/Mechanical Desktop to Works. There was far less knowledge that you could bring forward. I wasn’t really good at Autocad, I was just fast. This was mainly because Autocad is all about being able to visualize the 3D model in your head. That’s one skill that most of us CAD jockeys really have in abundance. I think that’s also why we are so drawn to software that helps you with that visualization.

In 1997, I taught myself SolidWorks by going through the help file. At that time I think it was just a single file. I did all the examples a couple of times. The first time I did it by the book, then I’d branch out and try to break it. See what was possible, and what isn’t. This included lofts and sweeps. I was very curious.

Maybe my list that started as “the single most important factor” needs to be expanded again to have 3 important factors. The third has to be a really strong understanding of geometry and process. Autocad is easy. You draw a line. TADA! SolidWorks is a little less easy. You draw a shape with certain internal relations and dimensions, and then you push that shape through some sort of process, like extrude, or sweep or revolve.

Moving from solids to surfaces means that you have to give up some of that, or add a couple more levels to your process. You also have to know the difference between sheets and volumes, and then how to move between them.

No matter where you are in your CAD/geometrical understanding, curiosity is the one thing that will take you to the next level. But curiosity will not be enough if you don’t have the flexibility for the mental gymnastics it takes to switch from one way of thinking to another. This applies to CAD, but you can also apply this to the rest of your life with equal effectiveness.