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 [...]

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 [...]

In Design Faster with Design Library and Mate References Pt1, I described the process for creating components with Mate References to be used in the Design Library. The Design Library is a great place to store assembly components you use most often in order to streamline the assembly process for new assemblies. This example will [...]

We have all had them, extraordinarily large assemblies that brings your computer to it’s virtual knees every time you open them. Sometimes you just want to work on a small area and opening an assembly is painfully slow. In 2008, SolidWorks introduced a new tool to help you in these situations: Quick view / Selective [...]

Earlier this month I wrote about Component Selection Tools in Assemblies and I left out a couple of new selection tools in 2008. Today We will cover those missing selection tools; Show Hidden Components, Advanced Select & Select Sub Assembly. These selection tools will come in handy later this week when we cover Quick View [...]

After reading Part 1 and Part 2 of The Appearance of Things, I hope you have found it easier to change the appearance of your parts. Now I am going to show you how to tie it all together using Display States. Like Appearance Callouts and the Display Pane, Display States are nothing new but [...]

The Appearance Callouts window is nothing new, in fact I believe it made its debut in 2006, but I feel myself using it a lot more in 2008. Since I started using it again, I discovered it really does make it easier to apply colors and textures to parts, bodies, features and faces. In watching [...]

SolidWorks 2008 brought the addition of new tools for selecting components that will make your life easier. Throughout the upcoming weeks we will be covering them all but today we will be covering the new selection tools Volume Select, Select Suppressed, Select Hidden, Select Mated To and Select Internal Components. These new tools are easily [...]

If you have spent anytime with assembly configurations in SW 2007, you would know how many steps it took to set up components for each configuration. Then if the component had configurations as well, it added even more steps. I don’t want to go on about some of the horror stories I have encountered but [...]