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More to Offer in Assemblies

Making assemblies of multiple parts is one area that SolidWorks has always been good at. To help create assemblies, they've included more ways to "mate" or join parts together. Once you form a new mate, you can now change it without deleting the existing mate and creating a new one. Sub-assemblies can have movable parts too <PICTURE D>. This is a major enhancement when dealing with several movable parts in a large assembly. Due in large part to user requests, parts and sub-assemblies can now be mirrored to form "mirror copies" of the originals <PICTURE E>. This saves a lot of time when making exact mirrored duplicates of existing parts. All of these features, and many others take advantage of the new shaded previews and animations mentioned before.

"Tweaking" the Detailing Tools

SolidWorks has added some major fixes to the detailing portion of their program. Especially when looking at the once limited uses of the automatic bill of materials tool. Before, this tool seemed very buggy, and little customization could be done to the generated bill. To fix this, they've added a "content" tab to allow the removal of unwanted items in the bill, and the ability to re-number items to suit the user. Overall, the bill of materials has a more trustworthy and reliable "feel" to it. The block command has been revised to include the ability to explode, edit, and create new block files right from the actual drawing file. Ordinate dimensions are more changeable with the ability to drag witness lines from the center of arcs, to an edge. You can even move the "zero" location you've dimensioned from, and have the other affected dimensions update! The section, detail, auxiliary, and projected view commands have been changed to make them easier to use, and even work with exploded view drawings now. The detailed views command has been modified to include many more options like the "connected" view display.

Working together with Other Programs

If you work between several different CAD drawing packages, you're probably used to transferring back and forth DXF or DWG files. SolidWorks 2001 has a new translator to help this conversion be as easy as possible <PICTURE F>. It gives a preview of the drawing, allows you to import at a different scale, change paper sizes, pick a different template, and even relocate the geometry using X and Y coordinates before doing the actual import. Microsoft Visioã is now more compatible with SolidWorks, and can be used to make schematics right inside a drawing. ACIS files (.sat) can now be imported and keep their original solid colors. IGES files can now be loaded in SolidWorks with 3D curves too.

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