What’s New in SolidWorks 2019: Part III

There are some more things that are interesting or useful that have been added to SW2019:

Default Save Folder: Tools/Options/File Locations now allows you to specify a default save folder, as opposed to the lased used folder.

Assemblies: There are two nice assembly enhancements. One is the ability to simplify an assembly using either Defeature to remove features from individual parts or Silhouette to just extract the outlines.

The second has to do with saving an assembly as a part. You can select components based on 3 criteria: visibility of the part from outside the assembly, volume of the part, and if it is a Toolbox part or not.

Drawings: A couple of odd additions in drawings: Scrollbars (?!?) can now be independently activated (drawing scrollbars are independent from part or assembly scrollbars). And a drawing Open progress bar.

Import/Export: SolidWorks can now export parts and assemblies (including color) to the *.ply polygon format. Also, the 3D Interconnect (associative import) can now work with tessellated data.

Visualization: A new 3D Texture tool transforms textures into 3D geometry.

Sketching: Projected curves can use multiple closed or open loops in a single sketch. This was something I used to complain about often, I think.

A new Slicing tool will create intersection curves at several offset planes. This was always possible, but you had to do it manually.

Generic splines created by offset, converted, or intersection curves always presented some editing challenges. Now these are supposedly easier to edit. Most of the spline enhancements of the last several years (think style spline) have been things that were previously possible, they just used options that were somewhat more buried in the RMB menus, so nothing new, just somewhat more convenient.