It has been quite a while since the last tutorial about the stapler. The last component of the stapler we created was the Staple Cradle.  Before moving on to another area of the stapler, we will need to build one more component to complete the Staple Cradle. Today we are going to build the front [...]

Today we will conclude the Indulge Your Sweet Tooth series with an extra long post about PhotoView 360. If you are not familiar with PhotoView 360 (or PV360 for short), you do not know what you are missing. PV360 is a simple but powerful rendering package that installs along with SolidWorks Professional or SolidWorks Premium. [...]

Hump day is upon us and, as promised, I am bringing you the next exciting installment of Indulge Your Sweet Tooth. This series explains the steps to creating a photorealistic image of peppermint candies. The first two parts of this series explained the process for modeling a peppermint candy and how to use appearances in [...]

On the week before SolidWorks World 2010, I wrote the first post in this series where I showed you how to create the multi-bodied part for a peppermint candy. Today, we are going to finish the part model by applying the appearances to part to finally make it look like a peppermint candy. You might [...]

For the first tutorial of 2010, we are going to create this image of a stack of peppermints using SolidWorks and the new features of PhotoView 360. A few weeks ago I came across an image much like this one on IStockPhoto.com and I thought it would be a fun project to do. After creating [...]

Unless you are completely new to SolidWorks, you have more then likely used the Coincident mate. It is probably the most common mate used when building assemblies. Today, we are going to look more into using the coincident mate to limit the degrees of freedom in your assemblies. If you are familiar with the Coincident [...]

After a long break from writing, I have decided that I will make my return with the long promised series about SolidWorks Mates. The next few posts will cover every aspect of mating in SolidWorks. If you found this article after Googling mates and mating thinking you would find some cools tricks to help you [...]

Sometimes, the actual arc length is more important to specify then other dimensions. In Drawings and Sketches, you can easily specify the actual arc length. If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Often times in Sketches and Drawings, it is more important to specify the distance to the outside of an arc or circle then the center. If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Picking up where we left off on Friday, we are going to be finishing up the stapler cradle today. If you missed the first part of this tutorial, you can find it here. In the first part of this tutorial we started building the staple cradle using standard features that we will then convert to [...]