SolidWorks 2012: What’s Hot and What’s Not

2012, even though it’s a lightweight year for modeling, does have a couple of nice enhancements. Some easy crowd pleasers like Select All (with filters – very nice and about damn time), Search Commands (more basic than the Solid Edge tool), and units in the Status Bar, as well as equations in the Modify dialog.

You can also see that the logo is somewhat new. Kind of a Star Trek Next Generation type of font. See the resemblance? Maybe? A little bit? Maybe not. Ok, so you can download the Star Next.ttf font file here. I’m just glad they haven’t yet replaced the red SolidWorks cube logo with the dang DS logo. Maybe they understand deep down that people who run the software really haven’t bought into the whole DS thing. Not that it matters.

Anyway, I want to spend more time on a couple enhancements I find important. I may come back and talk about some of these mentioned above in a later post. Here’s something some of you will like:

Ok, get a load of that! Now that’s dual monitor support. This was #1 on the wishlist, what, 3 years ago? Anyway, We’ve got it now, not the interface preset they put in a couple years ago and called it an enhancement satisfaction. If you use dual displays, it’s cool. No idea how it works with more than 2 monitors. Each document window contains the controls shown to the left. Setting up a doc window in each monitor was possible before, but you had to do it manually, and it took a long time. So this is actually a cool enhancement that I would probably use.

There are some limitations actually pointed out by the What’s New doc. The main one is that your screens should have similar resolutions to work best. Side-by-side screens should have similar vertical resolution, and over-and-under arrangements should have similar horizontal resolution. SW will use the resolution that allows the largest single rectangular application window stretched across both monitors. My screens are different size (24″ wide aspect on the left 1900 x 1200, 21″ normal aspect 1600 x 1200 on the right), but they work well together because the vertical resolutions are the same. The actual physical height of the two monitors differs by about 0.25″, as you can see in the photo above.

Next, the whole SW window has the controls shown to the right. That extra button enables you to span the available displays with the SW window. This is kinda cool, and stuff I’ll use. I haven’t used this much at this point, but what time I have spent with it, it has made me smile.

But then there was this, and I’m sorry for posting about this again, but it’s a bug that started in 2008 beta and has persisted in every release since then. Minor, yes, but a pain in the @$$ that I have to deal with every time I open a document. I was told by some folks on the SW forums that SW has claimed this was fixed a couple of times. It turns out that if you put a toolbar on your toolbar area to the right of the CommandManager, then the CommandManager tabs will cover over the FeatureManager tabs whenever you open a new document. It’s easy to fix, but you have to fix it every time you open a document. The fix is to tug the width of the FeatureManager a little, or there are a couple of other ways to get it to snap into place. Well, that or give up that wasted space in the interface next to the CommandManager. Or give up the entire CommandManager, which it sounds like a lot of people do. Remember the CommandManager was put there to more efficiently use the interface space. Go  back and read the 2008 what’s new for a good laugh.

Anyway.

I’ve been holding out on you. Here’s my favorite: The Freeze Bar. You know when your design just bogs down and you just need to take a little break, and something maybe cold and yummy would do the trick? Well, this ain’t that kind of freeze bar, bucko, so get it out of your mind. Don’t mind the picture over there. Mmmm. Maybe the chocolate. Yes, with sprinkles, please.

Ok, now that you’re back from your little mental break there, here’s the real deal on this Freeze Bar. It turns out that SolidWorks is learning a little bit. Usually they would just jam this thing into the interface and turn it on by default and basically fly you the bird and say “deal with it”, claiming that they are doing customer satisfaction research.

Just for a change, this time, they added something important to the interface, but gave users the option of whether to use it or not. Now that’s innovation. Or at least an improvement over  the usual methods. SolidWorks must consider this highly dangerous, because they turn it off by default, while something like virtual parts is turned on by default. Hmmm.

Just as an aside, I know a lot of people make fun of the Options dialog. The fact that it is so huge seems to scare some people. Frankly, I like having options. Lots of options. I used to publish a 60 page PDF that explained every option in this dialog every year, but stopped doing it when I incorporated it into the books. Then I put it into its own book, the Administration Bible. It’s not exactly a novel type of read, but it does have stuff like all the options in the Options dialog. It was written for 2009, so it’s missing a couple of years of enhancements at this point.

The Freeze Bar is not in the Admin Bible. But it will be if anyone ever updates that book. Or you could just print this page and stuff it in the book, and then it would have it. Or not. Your call.

So this is how the Freeze Bar works. First go to Tools > Options and enable the Freeze Bar as shown above. Then go to a model with a big
tree. The batmobile qualifies, with 332 features. By the way, notice the sloppy modeling with 18 solid bodies and 37 surface bodies? Yeah, it was just a show model, not for any sort of paying customer, or I wouldn’t leave it that way. Anyway, right click on a feature in the tree, and select the Freeze option, about half way down the list. Notice there is no icon, like a snow flake, an ice cube, a Santa hat, or skiis, or Han Solo in Carbonite, or anything like that.

Anyway, when you click on the Freeze option, all of the features above where you right clicked get a Lock icon (why a lock icon if the imagery here is Freeze?). The feature icons are still active, but the feature names are grayed out. Anything locked (frozen) will not rebuild even when you ctrl-Q. And you cannot move the rollback bar above the Freeze Bar.

The Rollback bar starts at the bottom and you drag it up. The Freeze bar starts at the top and you drag it down. In addition to the right-click method, you can also freeze features by dragging the bar. Once activated, it starts at the top of the tree.

The features above the Freeze bar cannot be edited, and do not rebuild, but the geometry for the feature will remain and essentially act like imported geometry. This does 2 things: saves rebuild time, and prevents version-induced rebuild errors. The frozen features must all be in one contiguous group, just like the Rollback features, but upside down.

To me, this new functionality makes an awful lot of sense, and has been overdue in the software since users started making models with over 100 features. It is certainly valuable for old surface models which have highly volatile trees that burst into red with every version change. Is it going to cause some problems? I don’t know. I hope they ironed that out already and are not treating SP0 as Alpha1. It’s a great idea, though, regardless of the actual implementation.

This is a first step to gaining control over the history-based model. I believe this blog was a huge source of advocacy for this type of functionality. The freeze functionality was mentioned first by a reader in a comment on this blog a couple of years ago. It was a great idea and a lot of people embraced it. I’m glad that it finally made it into the software (it was supposed to go in 2011, but it was held back).

There is one interesting piece of functionality here, but it turns out not to have anything to do with the Freeze, and now that I’m trying to document it, of course I can’t reproduce it. If you click on a feature back in the tree, the display temporarily rolls back to that point. It does it very quickly, and without rebuilding the model, and there must be more to it than what I’m noticing just in doing this. If someone finds this in the What’s New, can you fill me in on what it is? I can see this could be cool or it could be a real annoyance. Hope we have an option for it. Anyway, it stopped working, and now I can’t reproduce it, but it was definitely there.

And then there’s exploded views of multibody parts. Ok, one more thing to take off the list of differences between assemblies and multibody parts. Some people will claim this is the second coming of Yoda. I’m rather indifferent.

Templates for split parts anyone? Yeah, that’s an improvement.

Version compatibility? No. Psych. You fell for that one again.BAaaaaaahhaaahahaaahaaaaa!

Now here’s one that is gonna hit a nerve. Planes. No they didn’t fix that the first time you create a new plane in a session, it takes 20 seconds to see the Reference Plane PropertyManager, that one remains. It’s more like plane alignment, but not the flipping planes we tend to complain about. Here’s a graphic to help:

In 2011 when you copied the Top plane (ctrl-drag), the copied plane wound up rotated 180 deg from the original. Not flipped, rotated. So the plane normals might be aligned (rather than anti-aligned), but you can see from the positions of the names on the planes in the two pictures that the 2012 way of doing things is different. The Z axes would line up in 2011, but the X and Y axes were180 deg off.

Is it “better”? Is it “right”? Nit picky details. Just be satisfied that it’s different, and that change is good, and you should be satisfied

with this because it’s pretty damned close to a modeling change, and you’re not getting that much else this year.

Anyway, I think this is an improvement. I haven’t modeled anything challenging in 2012 yet, but I’d even go as far as to say that this has corrected a bug that’s maybe 17 years old. So yeah, this is something to be happy about. Just as long as it doesn’t eff up existing models…

So in a 146 page What’s New PDF, about 8 pages are dedicated to Parts and Features. There are some additional things like sketching and sheet metal improvements, and a big list of stuff for drawings, of which I admit, I’m not much of a judge.

If you use SolidWorks for modeling, you’ve got to get excited about the little bit that you’re getting this release, because the rest of it is all about costing, simulation, sustainability, routing, etc. There is not a single new or enhanced geometrical feature in the entire What’s New list. So Ruled Surfaces have not been fixed. Flipping connectors on Boundary surfaces haven’t been fixed. We don’t have a conic sketch element. Thin features are not implemented uniformly, nor are feature end conditions for Revolve features. Simple stuff like sketch fillet reliability is still a big problem. Fillet, Shell and Offset features will not explain to you where they are failing. We can’t specify minimum curvature of a Fill surface. Filleting around a curl still can’t be done on non-sheet metal parts.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for non-mechanical, non-engineering, non-CAD tasks that you can use SolidWorks 2012 for, well, you should be right at home. When I see the invasion of all of these other types of tasks, and the dearth of modeling functionality, it says to me that SolidWorks thinks they’ve done all they can do with geometry creation, evaluation, and editing.