SolidWorks 2011: What’s New

SolidWorks 2011 is being announced. It’s not ready to install, it’s not ready to ship, it’s just being announced. It is currently in beta 3. Next come a couple of pre-release versions, and then SP0.0 some time in October probably. If you’re the kind that has to wait for a set of disks to arrive, tack on another several weeks for that. I haven’t installed from disks in quite a while now, which is one of the nicer things they’ve done from the administration side of things.

As usual, I wouldn’t recommend SP0 for organizations that are sensitive to bumps in the road. So you’ve got some time to listen to the upgrade-obsessed among us to install and kvetch.

The big question is – what will you be missing?

I have a later post on my favorite stuff in the new release, but for this one, I’ll try to project what I think the important changes are for most folks. I’ll reserve comment on stuff because the things I care about come in the second post on 2011.

Defeature for Parts and Assemblies.

From the What’s New,

With the Defeature tool, you can remove details from a part or assembly and save the

results to a new file in which the details are replaced by dumb solids (that is, solids without

Configurable items

New things are configurable, like global variables, scale features, and cosmetic threads.

Drawings

If this release is known for anything, I think it will be known for the changes big and small to drawings. Alignment and auto arrange improvements. Hiding bodies in views. Model colors in drawings. There are a lot more, I think this was the biggest category of changes. You’ll have to check it out for yourself.

Display Manager (?!?)

In case you weren’t confused yet, SolidWorks has made more changes to color/appearance/scenes/decals/textures. The best news from this is that decals are now part of the base product.

The other really big change here is PhotoView 360. Photoworks (and Photoworks 2) is finally dead. I can’t get it to run on my system for whatever reason. Photoview 360 does not render inside the SW window, and all of the visual settings are grouped into the DisplayManager tab.

This is what my post “When is a great explanation a bad thing?” was all about. Marlon Banta really made some nice videos explaining all of this in the beta forums. He really did a nice job. But while I was watching and learning I thought, wow, changing colors is as complicated as surfacing! My hat’s off to Marlon, because the videos were great, but he must have realized this as well – the topic is just too complex. SolidWorks has gutted the color functionality a couple of times, and I think that they are going to have to do it again. It is simply out of control.

Large Scale Design

The other “really big thing” in SW2011 is large scale design. This is a euphemism for architectural structure. This could well be the beginning of SolidWorks trying to give Revit a run for its money.  The new functionality looks primitive at best, but it lays the ground work for more that is to come. This is mainly a 3D wireframe of a fabricated framework. This is niche functionality, just like piping. I suspect, just like piping, that this is initially also a sales tool for the oil and gas industry.

So, that’s kind of a quick overview of what’s new. I will have more to say about some particular features in posts that will come up shortly.