Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

For whatever reason, SolidWorks employees working on beta cannot hear you when you tell them about bugs that exist in previous versions. It’s as if its “somebody else’s job” – a sure sign of corporate bureaucracy gone amok. I find this to be one of the most off-putting aspects of the beta program. Especially when bugs reported last year aren’t fixed this year, and they don’t want to hear about it.

In fact, the most common reaction I’ve seen of SW beta folks in general is that their first line of defense is to disprove that you have found a bug at all. This year, I reported a crash and some dimension display problems. The dimension display problems were certainly there for b1 &2, possibly fixed for b3 (sketch dims appeared far away from where placed, remained highlighted, and no other sketch dim could be selected). But whoever I submitted stuff to said they couldn’t see the problem, and closed out my report. After that I didn’t bother reporting anything else.

So I thought I might take a look at some of the bugs that have been around for some time, and see if they still exist in SW2011.

These bugs turn out to be interface bugs, which is relieving in one sense, because at least it isn’t a broken feature, or a crash bug, but annoying in another sense, because you see them all the time.

The first one is that the FeatureManager tabs are obscured under the CommandManager tabs. I think this one has been there since 2008. It’s annoying, is like this for every part you open (until you change the width of the FeatureManager window), and everybody who uses the CommandManager sees it all the time. To me, this makes the software look pretty amateurish, and requires an annoying but easy tweek to get it to display properly.

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I use the detached PropertyManager. Great function, in theory, but it is a thoroughly buggy interface mode. first of all, the Plane PropertyManager sometimes takes 10 seconds to show up the first time it is used in a SW session. And then when it does show up, the control buttons are half blanked out every time. Beyond that, the auto expander does not work, and every time, you have to drag the bottom of the PropertyManager to see the rest of the window. This almost makes the detachable PM unusable for me.

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And then Delete Face. It always shows up scrunched, and always defaults to Delete And Patch instead of remembering what I chose last. So if you don’t want to patch, you always have to expand it and make the selection.

Then there is the OK button.

Notice in the image to the left where the cursor is, and it is highlighting the green check. So way down there, you can click OK. Ok, that’s not entirely awful. But then look at the second image. the cursor is just touching the check, and it is no longer highlighted. This looks like a minor thing, but it isn’t. You can hack and slash at that check mark with the cursor, and maybe by luck you will finally figure out where to click to get it to accept the OK. Again, this is amateurish.

In other interfaces such as Ruled Surface, the OK button is on the RMB, which I think is a brilliant and highly time saving, workflow speeding piece of interface. But unfortunately, the button doesn’t show up over the PropertyManager, or flashes sporadically. It only shows up after you move the cursor off of the PropertyManager, which seems a bit unexpected to me. There is a slight change from 2010 in this behavior, since in 2010 it shows up over the PM, but simply doesn’t work.

Here’s another wonderful productivity enhancement.

This time it is specific to users of multiple monitors. My left monitor is a 24″ wide aspect, my right monitor a 21″ normal aspect. SolidWorks is on the left. When you use the Modify dialog, and move the scroll wheel, when you move the cursor to the left, the cursor shoots all the way to the far right side of the right monitor. Ok, I can see that one is a special case and may be hard to follow, but it has been in the software for a couple of releases, and I know the SW employees who need to know about it already know about it. So why can’t it get fixed instead of revamping the display/appearance/scenes/materials/textures train wreck again?

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones I deal with on a daily basis. The frustrating part is that they were reported properly in their respective beta test periods, and nothing was done. Yeah, there are workarounds in each case, but they are for the most part obvious problems, and should be easy to fix. Does something like Model Dissection really help my productivity? No, but interface bugs do hurt it.

I think if you were to skip a release (in addition to 2008) in the last 10 years, SW2011 one would be the one to skip. But not for the reason you might be expecting. This release doesn’t suck, but at the same time, there is little to recommend it. To me, this is is an uneventful release. This is both good and bad news. It’s good news because they didn’t play alphabet soup with the interface again (aside from standardizing some icons, which is a good thing). It’s bad news if you were hoping for some real modeling enhancements like Conic sketch elements and Freeze the feature tree.

Here are the few enhancements that I found most compelling when reading the What’s New for 2011:

“Surface Extrudes From a 2D or 3D Face”

The ambiguous tech writers at SW have struck again – you know, the ones who never tell you what you can’t do, even if that information is really the defining key of the function. You can already extrude a surface from a 2D or 3D face. The thing you can’t do, what this feature is talking about is extruding the 2D or 3D face itself. Even after reading the What’s New, it took me a while to figure that out. The thing they don’t say here is that this technique cannot be used when extruding a sketch. Yes. I’m serious. So this is on my list of favorites, but that is assuming that leaving out sketches from the list of things you can extrude was a simple oversight which will be corrected by SP5.

Anyway, on with the feature. Lets assume you have one of these egg carton surfaces, cuz honestly, who doesn’t. And you want to extrude it or a portion of it. So you make a split line in it, pre-select the face to extrude (alt-select if it is a planar face you want to extrude instead of a sketch), establish an extrusion direction with a plane or axis, and voila.

You can cap the end, delete the original and knit the result. Now honestly, these three options shown at the bottom of the PropertyManager are only displayed if you have the right combination of things selected. The options would be pretty useful if they were available to regular sketched extrudes, which make up 99% of extruded surfaces. You can already make this type of geometry with a Ruled Surface, so extruding from a 3D surface is no new capability, really. The new stuff is utterly hamstrung because it can’t be used with sketched extrudes. This feature gets the “WTF” award for 2011. It saves you a bunch of steps, but only if you extrude without sketching. Ayy.

Ok, on to the next favorite. Reusing Curves. Are you serious?!? We can reuse curves now?!?  Here, take a look:

Our ever present egg carton had a curve projected on it, and a sweep was made using the curve as a path. Sweep paths are the primary use of curves, at least for me. I should note right here, that even if the rest of this experiment goes south, SW did fix one thing: The curve is now hidden after it is absorbed by the sweep feature. It never did that before. Kudos. Next I want to loft from the circle to the curve. This should test the reusability.

PWNED

Ok, busted. Sorry. It sounded so good in the What’s New, I almost believed them.

Oh well, we’ve got one more. New end conditions for revolve features.

The main thing you’re not going to believe here is that it actually works, so I don’t have much else to say except “thanks”. This one has been a long time coming, and now that it’s here, I think many people will welcome it as if it had always been there.

Next is the Show Model Colors In Drawing.

This is one I’ve wished for for several years. Not that I do a lot of drawings, just that every other part of the software is in color, but drawings are so, well, so… black and white. How 1960′s. Anyway, it’s in there now and it works.

Congratulations, SolidWorks. There were 4 things I was interested in for this release, and 2 of them work.

Some people will think that I’ve been plotting this post for the whole beta period, but I just sat down to write it and discovered some of these new functions aren’t very useful within the 30 minutes it took to write it. I hadn’t even tried the functionality until now. I guess I just expected it to work. Naive optimism will get you every time.

So what’s in this new release for folks who want geometry creation tools? Not much. The thing is that SolidWorks has become so huge, and they are distributing the same number of enhancements over much more software than they used to have, so the enhancements for any one field are probably very small. I only found interest in the “Parts and Features” heading of the What’s New. That’s one heading of 30 some. The topics with the most changes (gaged by lines in the What’s New PDF table of contents) were Drawings & Detailing, Enterprise PDM, and Simulation. All of those areas are certainly worthy, because people use them, and I don’t grudge enhancements that other areas got, just that my pet area got precious few.

On the other hand, many users have been asking for changes to be scaled back, and for bug fixes to take a front seat. Who knows. Maybe they are listening.

SolidWorks 2011 is being announced. It’s not ready to install, it’s not ready to ship, it’s just being announced. It is currently in beta 3. Next come a couple of pre-release versions, and then SP0.0 some time in October probably. If you’re the kind that has to wait for a set of disks to arrive, tack on another several weeks for that. I haven’t installed from disks in quite a while now, which is one of the nicer things they’ve done from the administration side of things.

As usual, I wouldn’t recommend SP0 for organizations that are sensitive to bumps in the road. So you’ve got some time to listen to the upgrade-obsessed among us to install and kvetch.

The big question is – what will you be missing?

I have a later post on my favorite stuff in the new release, but for this one, I’ll try to project what I think the important changes are for most folks. I’ll reserve comment on stuff because the things I care about come in the second post on 2011.

Defeature for Parts and Assemblies.

From the What’s New,

With the Defeature tool, you can remove details from a part or assembly and save the

results to a new file in which the details are replaced by dumb solids (that is, solids without

Configurable items

New things are configurable, like global variables, scale features, and cosmetic threads.

Drawings

If this release is known for anything, I think it will be known for the changes big and small to drawings. Alignment and auto arrange improvements. Hiding bodies in views. Model colors in drawings. There are a lot more, I think this was the biggest category of changes. You’ll have to check it out for yourself.

Display Manager (?!?)

In case you weren’t confused yet, SolidWorks has made more changes to color/appearance/scenes/decals/textures. The best news from this is that decals are now part of the base product.

The other really big change here is PhotoView 360. Photoworks (and Photoworks 2) is finally dead. I can’t get it to run on my system for whatever reason. Photoview 360 does not render inside the SW window, and all of the visual settings are grouped into the DisplayManager tab.

This is what my post “When is a great explanation a bad thing?” was all about. Marlon Banta really made some nice videos explaining all of this in the beta forums. He really did a nice job. But while I was watching and learning I thought, wow, changing colors is as complicated as surfacing! My hat’s off to Marlon, because the videos were great, but he must have realized this as well – the topic is just too complex. SolidWorks has gutted the color functionality a couple of times, and I think that they are going to have to do it again. It is simply out of control.

Large Scale Design

The other “really big thing” in SW2011 is large scale design. This is a euphemism for architectural structure. This could well be the beginning of SolidWorks trying to give Revit a run for its money.  The new functionality looks primitive at best, but it lays the ground work for more that is to come. This is mainly a 3D wireframe of a fabricated framework. This is niche functionality, just like piping. I suspect, just like piping, that this is initially also a sales tool for the oil and gas industry.

So, that’s kind of a quick overview of what’s new. I will have more to say about some particular features in posts that will come up shortly.

A little bit of a different look to the splash screen this year. Even if you don’t want to download and use the software, at least browse to the beta forums to get the What’s New and chat with folks who did the download.

For features that most users don’t use, I’m hitting these kinda hard. Move Face and Delete Face have a new face selection tool. This works like the one in the FilletXpert. Sorta. Not that many people know how that one works either. Anyway.

These symbols stand for All Surrounding, All Outer and Inner Loops, All Coplanar and C0onnected Faces, All Internal To Feature. Being able to apply these takes some time and practice, but the method works in both Move Face and Delete Face.

I did finally figure out the Move face issue that Ricky and I were having. You can’t move just a single face. You have to move enough faces (along with extendable faces) to enclose a solid. In the case below, you would have to move the two vertical faces on the feature at the left end of the part (one you can see, the other faces away).

If you start from a part like the one above, you can use Move Face with the Translate and Copy options to get the part shown two images below. Notice I used the new selection method by selecting the light blue face, then the All Surrounding option. The selection here works with either 3 or 5 faces selected. You could eliminate the big L shaped face from both sides and the feature would still work because the L faces can be extended easily. Also note that if any of the faces selected by the All Surrounding option were selected before you clicked the icon, the All Surrounding function will toggle the selection so that the previously selected face is no longer selected. Bug or Feature?

One thing to notice about the result is that it has a split face in it. See to the left of the new feature that the long face of the part is split. SolidWorks had some problems with faces getting split by various things many years ago, and fixed those issues to a great extent. Ironically, the split face can be fixed using the Delete Face feature.

Be aware that an existing feature already has the capability shown here with the Copy option, without the split, however it doesn’t work if the copied feature is on the end of the part. The Linear Pattern, patterning Faces works beautifully on a slightly altered part. This pattern faces function has been available for a few years. The interesting thing here is that all of this functionality (move and delete face as well as patterning faces) can be used to edit imported geometry. So these are direct edit tools. Yes, you can pattern and copy faces that are part of an imported solid model, almost as if the import had features, almost like Spaceclaim and Synchronous Technology and CoCreate, and SolidWorks has been able to do this for years.

One of the problems I had with Delete Face in particular is that the Auto Collapse (upper right next to push pin) function does not seem to work properly. By that I mean that it does not Auto Expand. Notice that there are options on the bottom that are cut off. Note that I am working with the PropertyManager detached from the FeatureManager area.

We’ve been hearing stuff about speed improvements, so I thought I’d look into it. Frankly I never believe results that come from SW. This is stuff that has to be verified in the field. Or in your office, at the beach, where ever you are. Users have to do it with real data, not models optimized for the particular function.

So I did some benchmarks. These aren’t comprehensive, they just test a small corner of the SolidWorks modeling world. The first test was Anna’s punch holder. This is definitely not an optimized part, but it measures how patterns and parts with a lot of faces stack up against one another. I did 2009 and 2010, with 4 tests each, CtrlQ, no VOR,  testing with both Feature Stats and a stopwatch.

2009          2010
100.9 s     95.2 s

That’s 5-6% faster. Not much to brag about, but we are used to seeing things go the other direction. Add that to a switch to Windows 7 from Vista, and you’ll have 10-15% speed improvement. Not bad.

The time from when I hit CtrlQ to when I regained control of the cursor:

2009          2010
1:43             1:03

Wow. That’s an improvement of about 40%. That’s pretty good.

From the pattern intensive punch holder I moved to a curvy part with surfaces and multibodies and delete face features.

2009          2010
48.0 s         41.7 s

That’s 13%, twice as good as the blocky part. I read somewhere and now I can’t find where that was that speed improvements came in the multibodies area plus the Knit feature and all features that use knit (fill, mutual trim, face fillet, etc.). So we don’t have many improvements to modeling, but we do have some of the kinds of improvements that we’ve been looking for that will affect surface modeling folks quite a bit.

And then I kept hearing about improvements to Delete Face. In 2009, I would get like a 5 second hesitation sometimes just for firing up the Delete Face feature. On top of that, the feature performance has been slow. For this test, I just extruded a rectangular block that was completely contained within a single face, and used Delete Face to delete the 5 new faces, returning back to the original body.

Ok, what you need to see here is that last entry on both dialogs. On 2009, the Delete Face took 5.21 seconds, and on the 2010 it took 0.28 seconds. That, my friends, is a difference worth noting. Almost 95%. The difference between the rebuild time for the two parts is almost entirely this one feature. There’s no way this can be completely representative, but this certainly good news.

Ever since I can remember, people have complained about the reference planes creation in SolidWorks. Oddly, I never had a problem with it. I could always make the planes I needed to make. I might need to add some sketch elements to do it, but the tools were always there, and they followed geometrical rules that were easy to understand and predictable.

Then they started making planes in 3D sketches, which was one of those badly botched implementations that we are too familiar with. The plane interface I thought was less direct and less intentional – almost as if they expected users to randomly click faces, edges or whatever without any plan as to how all of that was going to make a plane.

Well, now they have used that “plane plan” to replace the method that so many people complained about. Be careful of what you ask for. You just might get something worse. Honestly, I don’t care for this method now any more than I did when they put it into 3D sketches. Some other people have said they like it, but I don’t put much stock in what people who always like everything have to say. That’s not critical thinking or analysis, its kowtowing. In Beta, I think the only feedback about this was positive. It took me a while to formulate an opinion. I knew I was uncomfortable with it, I just wasn’t sure why. Now I know why.

To me, it seems this interface expects you to do something completely random, and then it shows you what you can get for that random selection. It doesn’t allow you to have a plan. When you start the command, it looks like this on the right. You pick something, then it presents you with options, as shown on the left. It selects the constraints that it thinks you should use with that selection, and previews a plane for you.

This is the old “let us think for you” option. I don’t like that option in politics, and it doesn’t improve when moved into my CAD software. This way of doing things may grow on me, because I haven’t heard anyone else express reservation about it yet, but just the indeterminate nature of picking things when you don’t know why you’re doing it yet is something I find unsettling.

Plus, the whole first, second and third references is somewhat reminiscent of the first, second and third mate reference selections, which I can rarely get to work the way I want them to either.

I’m open on this one, if someone has a reason why this is so much better than the old way, but it kinda gives me the creeps.

Face it, this is not about functionality. Any plane you can make with this method you can also make with the other method. If you find something you can do here that you couldn’t do before, please show me, I’d like to know. The Mid Plane I recognize is new, but it could work in the old interface.

The old method gives you something to focus on. You look at the options, and pick one, then make your selections. With the new method, there is nothing to focus on. Just a blank slate. You pick something, and it decides what you meant to do with it.

I didn’t think the old method was broken, and fixing it doesn’t seem to have improved it much.

Well it’s here. You’ll no longer have to read about things that no one can talk about any more. Now you can talk about it. Even though you may have been using the beta software for months already, and even though the beta program is still in progress. Oh, the silliness.

The first thing you should do is run down to the beta site and read the 2010 what’s new. When you read the 2010 What’s New document, what stands out to you? I don’t mean what did the SolidWorks PR people tell you to think, I mean what do you think?

Here’s what marketing wants you to think:

SW2010 is about:

• User experience
• Reliability
• Performance

Is it really about any of that? Hard to tell until you live through a real project on it. By this point in Beta 2009 I had already done 2 paying projects in 2009 because I was so eager to get off of 2008. Will 2010 have that same allure?

Well, here’s what stands out to me – this release is not about modeling so much. There are minimal changes that affect modeling. The bulk of the changes in 2010 are in the outlying areas, in material that was not even a part of the software in previous years. Things like CircuitWorks, 3D Content Central, Design Checker, Simulation, DFMXpress, Enterprise and Workgroup PDM, PhotoView, Motion Studies, SW Sustainability. Essentially a lot of stuff that is not part of core SolidWorks.

Is this bad? Maybe, maybe not. Some users have been asking SW to slow down development. The fact that roughly the same number of changes have been spread out over much more software means that core development probably has slowed down. What matters next is what they’ve done with the time they saved. This part really remains to be seen. I haven’t seen many overall opinions about 2010 in the beta discussions I’ve had, really the only idea that people seemed to identify with was that this release is light on the modeling, and that beta participation was down. If its light on the modeling, I hope that they spent the time they saved on that on solidifying what’s there already.

Shaodun Lin, the perenial beta champion, said that he thought SolidWorks 2010 was running  5-20% faster than 2009. I understand some of the old code has been gutted and revamped. If this is really the case, that would be very positive. It might even seem like SW listened to users – fewer big changes, more housekeeping, better performance.

So, what are my favorites?

Well, the new Knit feature has to be near or at the top of the list. If this were the only enhancement in 2010, it would probably make it worthwhile for me. For anyone who works with surfaces, I expect you’ll like what’s going on with it too. I already posted an article about just that feature.

Hole Wizard holes now use 2D as the default placement sketch type. That’s nice. About 8 years late for that party, but better late than never, I suppose. This primarily benefits new users. It was one of those issues that I used to recommend be changed until I gave up.

Multibody materials and part display states are another favorite. So far multibody materials don’t work for me (material list doesn’t exist), but I like the concept.

Multiloop Split Lines, without the extruded surface workaround. That will save some time!

XYZ dimensions in 3D sketches is a weak implementation, but it’s there. They can check that box, even if it isn’t really much good. Like all the other functionality they are shoehorning into 3D sketches, it only works on activated sketch planes. Some day. Some day they will make 3D sketches back into 3D sketches instead of a series of 2D sketches.

Move Face has some interesting functionality, where if you select a feature, it will offset every face of the feature. But it seems this is old functionality. It would be nice if it allowed you to select a body and offset all the faces. That would be great for creating electrodes with sparkgap or overmold or several other things. The Move Face entry in What’s New does produce one of the best lines in the What’s New:

The new Copy option in the Move Face PropertyManager uses Instant3D functionality
to edit copied faces. You cannot create disjoint bodies using the Copy option.

What is that saying? Any idea? And then of course in true SolidWorks non-documentation style it doesn’t show the interface where the copy option would be if it were there. It turns out Copy only shows up for Translate and Rotate, not Offset. And as usual, the “why” question is neglected. The What’s New fails to mention a case in which you might want to use the Copy option. It looks like Ricky can’t get it to work either.

Multibody sheet metal may seem a bit obscure, but I’ve seen cases that were much more difficult to solve without it. You can also insert sheet metal parts into Weldments, which is one of those things that I’m sure will make a lot of people happy.

The changes in the interface look to be all positive this time. More flexibility to customize the Heads Up View toolbar, including turn it off! New mouse gesture donuts, drag the RMB to activate commands. Interesting. Flexible. The biggest interface enhancement to me is that the PropertyManager now remembers your last input. Now my Rib features will no longer be 0.394″ wide. This is the kind of common sense stuff that saves time and actually helps you work more quickly. Not menus that zoom or toolbars you can’t get rid of.

Are there any big losers this time?

Well, SolidWorks Sustainability, while it might have some cool material selection options, gets a definite negative vote just because it’s trying to cash in on hype. Material selection is an everyday part of work, and it was as important 100 years ago as it is today, but today there is a perceived hype value. This is a transparent attempt to cash in on hype, pure and simple.

Changes to the Fit Spline tool are welcome, but really weak compared to what this tool needs. It needs a definition you can go back and edit later on to include new sketch elements or change the tolerance. What it got was cosmetic changes to the interface.

Configurable sketch patterns. Ugh. Just tell those Autocad users to crawl back under their rock. Regular sketch patterns are bad enough without configurable sketch patterns. Ideally more tools = more power, but this one is just “more crutch”.

SolidWorks 2010 is kind of modest in the interface changes department. Thankfully. One of the things they added was what some folks were calling “marking menus”, or command donuts or mouse gesture. Drag the RMB slightly, and this ring appears. The usage is meant to be just make a quick RMB drag going up and the view changes to the Top view. RMB drag right for the Right view. This is what SolidWorks is talking about when they talk about “touch support”. These gestures work great with tablets. There is also supposedly “multi-touch support”, which means zoom, pan, rotate, fit, and roll, but I don’t have a multi-touch device handy at the moment. Neither does anyone you know, probably.

This interface is customizable, using either 4 or 8 segments. You can use the Tools, Customize dialog to put whatever commands on the donut you want.

So does this get used or just sit there? Dunno. I might use it. It seems to have some advantages over the S key, in that it doesn’t require 2 clicks, but it can’t handle as wide a range of commands as S key either. The best use is probably just the way they have it set up, to control the view. You can’t do a wide range of stuff with it, so you might as well limit it to something specific. The view is even intuitive, having a direction just like the motion.

Overall, thumbs up for an interface that doesn’t get in the way and isn’t an implementation disaster. Actually, I think this is better than just not disasterous, it is right on the money in terms of utility, customizability, turn-it-off-ability, and unobtrusiveness.

If you are a surface feature user, the 2010 enhanced Knit feature is worth the price of admission all by itself. This is a feature that allows you to get the job done. In 2010, when a 2009 knit would otherwise fail, the Knit feature shows you what the gaps are that cause the knit to fail, and allows you to adjust the tolerance for the gap. Let’s take an example I ran into on the SW forums recently.

Here is a set of sketches a guy on the forum posted. He’s making a puffy box with rounded ends. He’s trying to do it as a solid with a single feature, lofting to points on each end. Not working. Break it up into surfaces with a big boundary and two filled caps, and it works.

Except for one thing. It won’t Knit.

Even with the Minimal Adjustment option on the Knit in 2009, the knit completes without an error, but you can see the blue edges say that there are gaps, and the knit will not solidify.

The Minimal Adjustment option in Knit is supposed to tighten the tolerance, so the gaps have to be smaller to work with Minimal Adjustment on. But in this case, Minimal Adjustment allowed the Knit to work (SW09 sp4.0), which seems backwards.

This is a little off topic, but this is one of those terminology things that SW doesn’t do so well on. “Minimal Adjustment” to me is completely ambiguous. It has different meanings depending on what point of view you are coming from. If you assume that SolidWorks is not adjusting your models at all, then a minimal adjustment means “more adjustment than usual”. If you assume SW changes your models a lot, then minimal adjustment is “less adjustment than usual”. So which is it? You have to look it up in the Help and assume the Help is correct. My experience here is exactly opposite of what the help suggests. Help says:

Select Minimal adjustment to make minimal changes to surfaces during knitting. Clear this option to increase the tolerance used during knitting, which might result in larger adjustments to surfaces.

The first sentence is a throw away. An English major could have told me that much (and probably did). It doesn’t add to my understanding even a little bit. It could still go both ways. Unfortunately, there is a lot of this kind of writing in the SW Help. “Clear” the option is code for “turn it off”. “Increase the tolerance” is something I think some people will misunderstand. You need a better way to say this. Maybe tighten or loosen would be better than increase or decrease. Increase is good, right? No, increase is bad. Increase tolerance means you need to accommodate bigger gaps, and make a bigger adjustment. Anyway.

So here’s the new stuff. Wow, this is powerful, and will bring a new understanding of the software to surface modelers. Information is power. Automated stuff that makes dozens of assumptions and decisions for you is not power, its letting someone else do your work for you. Automation is cool, but it always requires a sacrifice. There are two directions CAD developers can go: automation or modeling power. Gimme power.

Anyway, the plan here is that you can enter a number in the Knitting Tolerance box that is just bigger than the biggest gap. Or just checking the box next to the biggest gap will do that for you automatically. I can see this being used as another analysis tool. It might be useful if the gap information were available separately. You can get similar information from an import diagnosis, but only for imported geometry, not for native feature data.

This one enhancement makes this release worthwhile for me. I can’t tell you how much time this would have saved me if since I started working with surface models in SolidWorks. Every time a knit failed for some unknown reason and you had to try to find a workaround.

Since PhotoWorks is being replaced by PhotoView 360, SolidWorks is sponsoring a contest to try to get people interested in PhotoView. This will be a weekly contest with multiple winners weekly, and the first winners are already announced.

So if you think you can do better than those, then get crackin’ and submit some renderings! The great thing about PV360 is that it is fast. In this weeks winners you are getting something other than the same old default backgrounds. Maybe this is more of a show of the new capabilities in PV 360 2010.

Oh, I need to mention that this is a beta contest, so you’ve got to download the 2010 PV beta. They are giving away a lot of prizes, so you’ve got a decent chance of winning something.

As a part of the partner program for publications, I from time to time get special emails from SolidWorks. Today I got one of those emails with some important information that Solidworks users will want to know. This information was not part of a non-disclosure program or marked as such, so I didn’t feel the need to tell you I’ve got some important information which I can’t tell you, which seems like a silly thing for a blog writer to do.

Some of this has been the source of speculation for some time, and these statements from SW clear things up. Clearing things up is a good thing.

1) SolidWorks 2010 will be the last SolidWorks version to support Windows XP. According to the newsletter:

Due to the fact that Microsoft officially retired Window XP in April of this year; SolidWorks 2010 will be the last release to support both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP. SolidWorks 2011 (tentative release expected in the fall of 2010) will support Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit versions) only.

2) That goes hand in hand with the second announcement:

SolidWorks will support the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system as part of its SolidWorks 2010 release (scheduled for October of this year).  Right now Microsoft’s published release date for Windows 7 is Oct 22nd.  Based on this information the earliest version of SolidWorks 2010 that could support the Windows 7 operating system will be SP1 (tentative release expected in November this year).

Well, that’s neutral news to me, since all of my SolidWorks machines are running Vista, Windows 7, or both. Windows 7 should be an acceptable alternative to XP for most people.

3) And finally, the one that is probably not unexpected, but may cause a bit of a stir is that PhotoWorks is being retired after SolidWorks 2010. PhotoView 360 has been nipping at PhotoWorks heels for a while, and while it does not seem to be ready for prime time at this moment, there is a lot of momentum behind the product, and it is headed in a useful direction. Again to quote:

SolidWorks 2010 will be the last release to include PhotoWorks.  In subsequent releases PhotoWorks will not be available and PhotoView 360 will be its functional replacement and the sole photorealistic solution for SolidWorks software.

4) Since we are talking about retirements, SolidWorks 2009 is the last version we will see the Shape featue in. If you look at the FeatureManager of a 2009 part with a Shape feature in the tree, the feature has a yellow triangle with an exclamation point. The message says that Shape will not be in SolidWorks 2010.

I have never been a fan of the Shape feature. It was somewhere in between Dome and Freeform, but never really allowed you to get a shape that I would call “intentional” out of it. Retiring a feature is an extreme step, but I don’t think it is unwarranted in this case.

A little birdie told me that SolidWorks 2010 beta is now available for download.

This is the most appropriate use for twitter: broadcasting notices in an opt-in sort of way.

Anyway, you don’t need to clear your schedule immediately, the download is large, so you won’t have it installed right away.

You’ve got to be on subscription to get it, but go to the customer portal and you should see a link there.