SolidWorks 2008: Matt’s Favs

   The one nice thing about the new CommandManager is that you can make a new tab on it very easily.The FeatureManager Filter is probably my favorite enhancement in 2008. This thing is going to make life in long trees much more livable. This just shows features in the tree that correspond to the keyword you type in. I’ll be finding new ways to use this every day I’m sure.\n\nThe Context Toolbars are toolbars that pop up when you select something. These are going to take some getting used to, but are going to be a big time saver. It’s gonna take some time to adjust my workflow to take advantage of them, but they will be highly useful. As always, an option to turn them off would also be nice.

The Shortcut Bars are customizable, and come up when you hit S. These are flexible enough that they may be useful, but in general, hitting a key to bring up a toolbar seems like a waste. Why not just have the function you’re looking for on a hotkey? Anyway, it may be useful for stuff not on hotkeys.\n\nIt sounds like they’re running out of words to describe parts of the interface, because both Context (RMB context sensitive menus) and Shortcut (shortcutmenus, keyboard shortcuts) are words that are used elsewhere in the interface. It may become difficult to keep these things straight.

The Browse Recent Documents and Browse Open Documents each shows thumbnails of the documents, and makes things easier to identify quickly. It does take a little getting used to with the Ctrl-Tab, but that will be effort well spent, I think.    

Another favorite is the ability to dismiss the “Don’t ask me again” dialogs. Now these won’t come back until you go and find the message and turn it back on.

3D Sketch symmetry? If it works, sign me up! I think it is restricted to when you are working on planes in a 3D sketch.

Auto Trace is a cool tool that will trace over a sketch picture. This is something that I will certainly try out. It has the potential to be very useful. Tons of people ask for this kind of thing.

There is a new ability, not sure what it is called, that enables you to move between sketches more easily. This is potentially a very useful feature. It has had some problems with sketches being shown in the wrong colors, and it certainly has the potential to be abused, but once this is figured out a little more, it will making editing multiple sketches much easier.Spline On Surface can now span across tangent edges! Yippee!!

The FilletXpert is something I have been rather indifferent about, but now it is offering some options with mass edge selection which will certainly save me time. The example that they used in the bloggers web meeting was a part I had done for Rubbermaid. I remember spending hours selecting edges on ribs and intersections of ribs on that part. This is a function that will save me time. In case anyone has forgotten, why not fill out an enhancement request for a function that finds the maximum size fillet that will work on a given selection. That’s the FilletXpert function that I’ve been waiting for.

Cosmetic patterns – save performance. Not sure what it does on a drawing. It’s a RealView function.

The Split Part function has been revamped a little to allow connections between parts to be reattached. This has been a big problem for the use of Master Model technique for a while. The jury is still out on this one to see if it was fixed correctly, but if it was, this feature may have received a second life.

The ability to sweep a solid body to create a cut is another function that a lot of people have been asking for. This is pretty complex functionality, but the results seem to be “accurate enough”. Inevitably someone will complain because it is not exact, but for a “looks like” model, it is plenty good.

Any time you have a base or mirrored part, you can now bring forward sketches and features, and pretty much everything from the original model, even sever the link. This was another popular request, and will be highly useful.

Isolate was such a big success in assembly mode that it has now been brought into part mode for use with bodies. Body visibility management has needed a revamp since multibodies were introduced in SW. Maybe this will be the ticket.

Display states are now independent from configurations! Excellent!

Finally, Animator has been moved down to the base-level SolidWorks, and has been integrated with Physical Simulation and Cosmos Motion. All three are still available, but they have been combined into a single Motion Studies interface.\n\nDriveWorks Express is a great idea that I hope catches on. This is entry level rules-based engineering. It now comes with SolidWorks, like Cosmos Express.

eDrawings has some interesting new functionality. First display states in eDrawings, great combination. Second, you can view STL files with eDrawings… Maybe most importantly, 3dxml  (xps) capabilities. 3D is going to become as ubiquitous as 2D images are now. The Vista OS contains a viewer for a 3D format, and will enable you to put 3D images into documents just like you put 2D images in documents now. You don’t have to go to Vista to do this, you can get the Dassault Systemmes 3dxml viewer and do the same thing today. eDrawings will use some of these xps documents.

You can put weld beads in the corners of sheet metal parts! Excellent!    \n\nBatch processing through PhotoWorks!