SolidWorks 2021: What’s New

I haven’t written a What’s New in a while. I just installed SP3, so I’m very late to the game this time. Just in case you’re even later than I am, I’d like to share with you about what’s new in 2021.

In reading the What’s New Top Enhancements doc, the first thing I’m struck with is that the amount of CAD what’s new is dwarfed by the rest. In the image, the CAD stuff is boxed in red. The rest of the enhancements listed are some other part of “the bundle”. Everybody, or almost everybody benefits from the CAD stuff, and fewer people benefit from the other things.

The biggest category is PDM, with maybe electrical being second.

Among the CAD enhancements, the theme appears to be performance (which means speed in the SW dictionary). The performance enhancements include:

• drawing creation performance
• assembly lightweight enhancement
• assembly defeatured enhancement
• open, save and close performance enhancements
• occlusion culling, silhouette edges, config changes performance

This is probably the most important theme in the release. Assemblies seem to have had the most attention in this release, with drawings being second.

Of the enhancements to parts, it’s hard to say what’s the most important. 60 feature redo? Flanges on non-planar tangent edges? Equations in file and cut list properties? Part level materials transferring with derived parts? Nothing ground breaking, but I’d have to go with the material transfer, unless you do sheet metal of course, or are very prone to error correction correction.

I’ll admit I’ve been a little more excited in the past. What’s New time used to be very anticipated. I know a lot of the marketing energy has been directed away from main SolidWorks, and towards the 3DX. That has it’s own kind of excitement, as it allows me to learn something new. As I said recently in a CADForum.net post,

There are places for nostalgia, but technology isn’t one of them

https://cadforum.net

So as the technology world moves forward, it sometimes becomes our place to find a new place to fit in. I think on some level, most of us struggle to know when is the right time to make a change.