What’s New in SolidWorks 2019: Modeling

One of my favorite things to write about is What’s New, regardless of the software package. SolidWorks 2019 sp0 is available, so its fair game to talk about it publicly now. I didn’t participate in the beta this year to avoid getting confused about versions for the book, which covers 2018, so I’m pretty much getting my first good look at it now. It was tempting to listen to Alin’s stories of “wait for 2019, you’re gonna love this…”

The older SolidWorks gets the fewer real big modeling enhancements we see. I used to keep track of what percentage of enhancements were modeling related, because that’s the stuff that interests me most. Some other stuff like file management, visualization, or drawings are also important, but modeling is what gets my motor running.

I’m not giving a comprehensive list, just things that are related to modeling with some of my own examples.

Offset On Surface

This sketch function only works in 3D sketches, but it will open its own 3D sketch if you don’t already have one open for it. Let me just say, this is kind of a wonky implementation, whatever it was trying to achieve. I suggested something like this, but in the end the Face Curves function works much better for what I was envisioning. Actually, I think my enhancement was to move the edges (kind of like a reverse surface extend), not to create a 3D spline on surface from an offset edge. Anyway, let’s have a look.

I created a swept ribbon surface. If you offset the long edge, you get what you expect.

This is an edge offset. It turns out that it doesn’t have anything to do with the underlying U/V curves. You can offset it with a distance, and you get a 3D spline on a surface. There are two methods for offset – one is linear distance (called “geodesic”), and the other is along the curvature (called “euclidean”). On surfaces with a lot of changes in curvature, high offset distances don’t work very well. For example, offsetting the short end of the

ribbon yields the following result.

It fails if the offset gets much larger. So it appears to be parallel to the original, and doesn’t match the U/V. I suppose there must be a situation in which this is useful, but the examples shown in the SW 2019 What’s New Help are extremely simplistic.

Here is a different type of surface where the offset works for a small distance and then blows up. It looks like the offset spline kinks and fails. Because it’s an offset, it has to have some relation to the edge which is being offset, but because it is also a spline on surface, it has to have a relationship to the surface, and so must have a relationship to the surface. At some distance from the edge, the edge and surface don’t have enough in common to make both conditions work.

This function may make sense on planar or nearly planar surfaces, but I don’t think it can be applied in a random surface situation. If you’re trying to get a UV curve, then use the Face Curve function. If you’re trying to trim the surface edge back slightly, you might be able to use the Offset On Surface to create a small offset, and then trim the surface (or create a Face Curve and trim the surface with that). If anyone has a real application where they can envision this working, I’d love to hear it.

Trim Enhancements

The Sketch Trim function now has an option to keep trimmed entities as construction and to ignore construction geometry when trimming. These should be self explanatory and I think fairly useful. The two check boxes on the bottom of the PropertyManager are the new parts.

Partial Edge Fillet

Here’s one that I remember some people asking about. I never needed this, but I can see the usefulness of it. A partial edge fillet is just an option in the Fillet PropertyManager that enables you to stop a fillet part way along the edge. You can stop it with the green or purple dots or by entering values in the PropertyManager. In the past there were ugly workarounds for doing this, although I have to say I never had the need. The Fillet feature in SW is getting more and more powerful.

Interference Detection for Solid Bodies

Well, they finally did it. I made a list of things you couldn’t do when treating multi-bodies as assemblies, and they are chipping away at it. Only a few left on the list. You still have, uh, let’s see, a single feature manager for all the bodies, and dynamic assembly motion.

Summary

There’s not a lot of stuff in this list. Almost half of the top enhancements as listed in the What’s New are for extra cost add-ins. The partial edge fillets, construction trimming and body interferences are worthy enhancements, but when it comes down to it, I’m glad I didn’t hold up the 2018 book just for those three functions.

I’ll be back with another post on non-geometry enhancements for 2019. I know CAD does more than just make nice shapes, but to be honest, that’s all that really interests me much.