GoEngineer Blog

So many aspects of SOLIDWORKS PDM are customizable, which is why it's such a great tool for so a variety of industries. In this post, we will take a look at a couple of small but often overlooked areas of functionality that can be customized. This is the information provided in the Checked Out By column of the Windows Explorer Vault View.

Even with all of the advanced 3D solid modeling tools available on the market, having access to a 2D CAD tool can help perform tasks your 3D CAD software can't. A question I get asked a lot is, "Can SOLIDWORKS work with my 2D CAD data?" The short answer is yes. The long answer is a little more complicated. 

Have you ever opened SOLIDWORKS to find that the CAMWorks or SOLIDWORKS CAM icons were missing from the CommandManager or greyed out? This tutorial explains how to fix that by performing an icon reset. When this happens, it seems like all of the tool icons are missing (save one or two) or the icons are completely greyed out, thus impossible to use. 

Coloring sketches can be useful for communicating ideas to your team members and increase visibility with layout sketches. For this reason, SOLIDWORKS provides a way to quickly change the color of any sketch from default grey. Sketch Color can be found in the right-click menu of the FeatureManager Design Tree. For this example, I will color vertical structural member sketches in my weldment a different color than horizontal member sketches.

Many SOLIDWORKS users are familiar with cosmetic threads. Cosmetic threads are the go-to method for representing and documenting threaded holes and fasteners without needing to schematically represent the physical thread. Schematic representation dramatically increases the draw on graphics hardware resources. As an often-used feature, any changes in how it works are important.

By default, when performing a transition on a file with references in SOLIDWORKS PDM, the children will be selected to go through the transition at the same time. The user can deselect any files to be excluded from the transition by manually clicking the child references or by using CRTL-A. Some prefer all files be selected by default, others prefer to select the files manually to only transition files that they want to. The default setting can be changed so that child references are deselected.

On April 28th, 2021, Additive Manufacturing industry pioneer, Stratasys, unveiled three exciting new 3D Printers focused on manufacturing and production applications. These three new systems move 3D printing far beyond its traditional roles in prototyping and development into the realm of high-quality, higher-volume, und-use part production. 

Geomagic for SOLIDWORKS is a reverse engineering software and add-in that allows CAD users to efficiently import and work with scan data, large STL files, or other mesh-based models directly in the SOLIDWORKS environment. Once the add-in is enabled, Geomagic for SOLIDWORKS appears as a tab in the CommandManager for SLDPRT files.

A hybrid method of computational fluid dynamics analysis was used to enhance the design of a medical device to improve its ability to maintain a stable microclimate around a patient, but also to reduce both the computational efforts and the time required to obtain these results.