SolidWorks Labs: Treehouse

SolidWorks Labs is a bit of a place for SW Corp to make untested ideas available to the SW using public. It’s way better than just putting it into the SW software as a new feature, because people can opt in rather than having half-baked concepts and software forced on you. There are some useful or fun widgets, and some stuff you just have to think if these people have any sort of a filter between the idea board and the coding chair. Some of the cooler ideas are stuff like Cosmic Blobs Pro, The Watch It Widget, and the Drawings Nowapplications. If you have some time and curiosity, you might check out some of these. If you find something you like, encourage SW to develop the ideas and give some of your suggestions. That’s what Labs is really all about.

Anyway, the latest of these is called Treehouse. Some of the other bloggers have already written about this one, like CAD Fanatic, RaakSolid, and SW Geek. It’s not exactly what I was hoping when I first saw it, but it might nevertheless serve some useful purpose. Treehouse is a way to sketch out an assembly structure complete with subassemblies, parts, and part and assembly drawings. You can then name the documents before you even create them, and save them to disk. You will have a complete set of empty files created from templates on your File Locations list. All you have to do is open the parts and start modeling. If you use Predefined views on the drawings, the drawing views will be built as the model progresses. Here is an interface shot:

This might look a little like the SolidMap application I reviewed several months ago. But it’s not that, and it doesn’t do the same thing. Treehouse creates a blank assembly structure with blank files. SolidMap mapped out an existing assembly structure. When I first saw Treehouse, my first thought was that they had somehow acquired SolidMap. No such luck. There is still no decent tool for analyzing part or assembly trees.

Still, I can imagine Treehouse-like functionality inside SolidWorks, helping what seems to me to be awkward present workflow to put parts into an assembly. It would be useful if you could assign existing parts and assemblies into the Treehouse structure, and also if you could set up some of the master model type relationships in the tree. The nice thing about this is that it’s not a real product yet, so it’s ok to be incomplete. Labs is the right place to work out ideas like this.