The SolidWorks Geek

Today I will continue my long winded tour of  some of the over 200 enhancements in SolidWorks 2011. With so many enhancements it is impossible for me to cover everything, so instead I am highlighting some of the areas I am particularly excited about. I am not listing these enhancements in any particular order but I am trying to maintain some logical grouping just to make it easier to follow. Today I want to cover a couple new features in parts and assemblies before I jump into drawings in the next couple of days.

Defeature

Sharing models with SolidWorks users outside of your organization can sometimes be a scary prospect. In today’s world of “Be Evil” corporate philosophies simply sharing a model with a partner or vendor can result in intellectual property being stolen.   Unfortunately there are times when it is necessary to share your parts or assemblies with others. For example, maybe someone may need to know how your product fits in their assembly, or your packaging supplier would like the 3D geometry for their design practices or maybe you want to allow customers to download simplified representations of your products from your website. In the past you may have needed to create simplified versions of your models or even just bite the bullet and pray that your designs do get intercepted by the wrong people but now you can quickly and easily create simplified versions of your data using the new Defeature function. The Defeature tool, available in the Tools toolbar or in the Tools menu, allows you to create a new file that contains a simplified version of your product that can be shared with no fear.

Automatic Recognition of Draft Features in FeatureWorks

FeatureWorks, which is available in SolidWorks Professional and SolidWorks Premium, is a cool little utility that is used to recognize features in imported geometry and converts them into SolidWorks features that can be edited. Since it was introduced, I have found it helpful for me when I needed to modify models created by outside sources that used other modeling packages including Inventor, Catia and ProE. FeatureWorks has been a lifesaver in many instances but it has also been the object of my scorn at times. It is almost like the product development team is hearing my cursing when I am using FeaturesWorks because each year they surprise me with something new.

SolidWorks 2011 made great steps to quell my frustration with FeatureWorks with the automatic recognition of draft features. Many of the models I would get from outside sources are designed for the injection molding process which means they would more than likely contain drafted surfaces. This was a problem when I needed to make a modification to a feature such as changing the depth of a hole or decreasing the height of a boss. If the feature in question had a draft, which should be the case for nearly every feature in a molded component, FeatureWorks would just ignore the geometry during Automatic Recognition leaving an imported body in the FeatureManager Design Tree. Drafts can be recognized by FeatureWorks when using the Interactive Recognition Mode but I always struggled with this mode especially with models I wasn’t too familiar with. This would leave only one option to me, adding a feature to fill in a hole or cutting off a feature then creating the feature again with the updated parameters. As you can imagine, that was a real pain in the hind quarters on complex models that required more than a few updates.

Now with SolidWorks 2011, when recognizing features, FeatureWorks will understand that a feature or face has a draft angle applied to it and it will make the feature available in the FeatureManager Design Tree. Sometimes it is the littlest things that can make a geek shed a tear of joy and this is definitely one of those cases.

Combine Like Features in Automatic Feature Recognition

This one is another example of how SolidWorks understood my pain and gave me a big hug. Like I mentioned in my previous rant, I have a love-hate relationship with FeatureWorks. One of the things that always left me feeling like a jaded lover was how FeatureWorks handled features that were the same size. A very common example of this is when FeatureWorks recognized a part with multiple filleted edges that share the same radius. Prior to this release, each fillet would have its own feature in the FeatureManager Design Tree which you can imagine can get very long on some more complex parts. It maybe a minor thing but it still gets my heart racing thinking about my trees that were 2 miles long filled with just fillets. Those days are forever gone and I couldn’t be happier now that FeatureWorks will combine like features during automatic feature recognition. This means even if your model has 10 fillets that the same radius, there will only be one fillet shown in the FeatureManager. Whoever came up with that gets a big high five from me.

Even more to come…

Now that we got some of my favorite part enhancements covered, we will be jumping into one of my favorite subjects: drawings. Over the next couple of days, you will see how SolidWorks 2011 will make your drawings even easier to create but don’t wait till then to find out for yourself. If you haven’t already done so, install and play with the new version. And if you are as much of a geek as I am, take a look at the What’s New PDF that can be downloaded on the SolidWorks website.