SolidWorks 2013 Best of What’s New

Everybody has a different take on this, but this is my take. I’ll go through each heading in the What’s New and pick out stuff I like.

Interface:

Flat FeatureManager. This will greatly simplify things. This is one of my favorite requests, and I’m glad they put it in. It’s not exactly a modeling tool, but it will help sorting out the history while modeling. This just removes all of the dependencies from the tree. Nothing indented.

Fundamentals:

Equations. I don’t use equations a lot, but I think what they have done with them is really nice. Being able to enter equations in the Modify box is a huge benefit. And I think the equations interface is just a lot better now. The one thing that I have to take exception with is the Modify box. You’ve got all this stuff hanging off of it when you start typing. One of the big problems is that sometimes stuff hangs right in front of the main controls. That’s a noob mistake, and frustrating. Fix it guys.

View Manipulator. In theory this is a nice thing, but it seems to add a step to changing views. Someone on the forum had it right when they said the graphic just needs to be applied to model in situ, without reorienting everything. I think it could be fixed and made nicer. Oh, and make gaps between the faces so you can eliminate the 4 offset faces for back view selection.

Quick Filter. Nice. On the Open dialog, you can now filter for top level assemblies. This is a big time saver for me. It’s not just the Files Of Type selection, but it can tell which assemblies are top level, and not used in other assemblies. Nice.

Previous Release Operability. Bogus. This may have some limited application in limited situations, but I doubt many people will see much benefit from this. If you’re just going from the name, it’s not what you’re thinking. Limitations: earlier version must be on SP5, and you can only see 1 version into the future. Files opened in read-only mode. Would you like ice cream? All we have is pistachio with rat droppings. Why bother.

Selecting SW version when opening a file. Very nice. I really like this. Double click a file from Windows Explorer (I know, you’re not supposed to do that), and a dialog appears allowing you to select from all the SW versions you have installed. This is great for me, with 4-5 versions installed.

Cancel startup. Say you start the wrong program, or you already have a session running, or you start the wrong version. 2013 allows you to cancel out of the startup. And it works. Nice.

Assemblies:

Break all references. This is still short of what it should be, but it’s better than it was. If you’ve made several in-context parts, you no longer have to go through each part killing references. And, you can tell SW to not show the broken reference symbol =>X. This is all lame, but an improvement. There should be a tool that really removes the references, not just breaks them. Hiding broken references is lame too. This is for people who are afraid of errors, and don’t want to have to know how to really deal with them. To do this manually, you have to go through each feature/sketch/plane and delete broken relations, reassign if you’re so inclined.

Multiple exploded views per config. Another one I won’t use much, but it removes a silly limitation. Hooray.

Drawings:

Autoballoon. Works on existing balloons. Nice

Baseline, Radius and Diameter dimensions. If you haven’t used this, this is the best addition to the sketch environment in years. Click a centerline, click something else, place dim, then from there, you don’t have to select the centerline again. Esc backs you up one, so you can select a centerline again. Another Esc removes all the selections. It’s nicely done. I’ve been secretly hoping for this for a long time, and never knew it. Really nice.

Center of Mass. Apply the COG to the drawing. Nice.

Display note behind sheet. Never needed it, but you never know with this stuff. I’ll probably need it next week.

Zoom while editing text. Finally.

Revision cloud. What year is this?

View labels. Welcome to the 1980s.

Model display:

Appearances. Decorative fillets. In my line of work, I usually have to be explicit about every fillet. But, it is nice to now have the ability to leave a model sharp and let the video card round all sharps.

Parts and features:

Thin Extrudes. Can now use multiple open profiles. Thanks.

Hilighting for multibody items. If you select something, related bodies and features are highlighted in the tree. This has been a mess for a while, so I’m glad to see some small improvement.

Intersect. You’re going to have people tell you this is the second coming of Christ for surface modelers. It’s not. It IS somewhat helpful for simple parts, but because its more complex, it’s going to fail more frequently than the basic tools. So you don’t get any new capabilities with this. It will save you time on some simple models. The premise is that you can select manifold regions from a set of selected faces, surface bodies, solids, and planes. It’s tempting to look at this as a solution to crazy flashing psychedelic colors of the Trim, and it will be for simple parts, but simple isn’t where the difficulty is. I don’t want to put it down, because it will simplify multistep processes of trimming, knitting, thickening, etc. It’s like Mutual Trim where you can use solids, surfaces and planes, and the result is a solid. In the image to the right, the main block is solid, and the red knob is solid. The holes are surfaces. The result will be two blocks, and a cavity of the knob, with holes for the pillars and ejector.

Show hidden bodies. Self explanatory.

Configurations. Lots of changes to configurations. Some of which will take some experimentation to determine their usefulness. But one of the things that sounds great is the ability to purge cached data. This has a lot of potential for huge parts with many configurations.

Sheet Metal:

Forming tools now have the ability to be oriented more easily.

Sketching:

Conics. Another load of pistachio with rat droppings please. I’m sorry. I just find this somewhat useless, and a missed opportunity. You can’t make a c2 sketch relation to a conic. The Conic and Intersect are things added by Parasolid. So SolidWorks doesn’t have a lot of control. Still, they shouldn’t try to excuse the limitation. What would you use a conic with only tangency for? Nose cone for a plane. One advantage of the conic is that it can’t have any inflection points, and it’s predictably smooth. Unfortunately, if you loft (or boundary) between multiple conics, you can still get inflections in direction 2. So it solves half of half of a problem. Sorry, I’m just disappointed. I was looking forward to a more controllable tool than a spline. This is kind of a let down.

Summary

Overall, this is a pretty good release. Certainly the best since 2007. Not the best ever, though, not by a long shot. There are some disappointments, and some missed opportunities here. But they did pick up a lot of low hanging fruit, which is very welcome, and very visible to users.

Other things that need mention include installation. My experience with installation and uninstallation were poor. There’s not a clear path to success from where ever you find yourself. You’ve got to get in the groove first, then you can find success. That’s frustrating for software that has had this long to be perfected.

I’ve read that this cycle there were significantly fewer bugs, which is very believable, I mean users have been clammoring for fewer bugs for a long time. I want to hope that Mr. Bassi is going to breathe new life into the software, but I know that he is being brought in not for SolidWorks, but for V6. It’s not clear to me that he can preside over two divergent development projects. SolidWorks is still going to die, but I think maybe even DS has realized that they are going to need to push that event further out into the future.