Top 11 Features in SOLIDWORKS 2018 Page 1

As an experienced SOLIDWORKS user, I know sometimes there are frustrating situations throughout my design process. I have found myself making up excuses or justifications when including explode lines to my explored view; have been unable to mate two sets of holes that are not perfectly concentric and have questioned why my assemblies are slow. If like me, you’ve found yourself in any of these situations, then this blog article is for you. I will share with you some of my favorite features from SOLIDWORKS 2018 onward that have helped increase my productivity. These features will allow you to retire your clever workarounds for workflows you might use daily or during specific phases of your projects.

One of the best aspects of SOLIDWORKS is that it’s not just a 3D CAD tool, but that it's a complete engineering solution. Tools like SOLIDWORKS Simulation help us analyze our designs and test them for critical attributes such as strength and fatigue. In SOLIDWORKS 2017 and previous versions, Simulation Professional even included a tool that would allow us to optimize our design for a set goal while varying many of our design parameters. This took a lot of the guesswork out of creating the best possible design and reduced the number of iterations that were required in the design cycle. SOLIDWORKS Simulation Professional now includes Topology studies.

With every new release, SOLIDWORKS gives their users more functionality and value, while keeping subscription costs unchanged. SOLIDWORKS 2018 includes a new package that enables users to create CNC toolpaths directly from their SOLIDWORKS parts and assemblies.

When we're creating our designs, they are rarely perfect in their initial shape. Instead, they are constantly evolving as we make changes. We need a way to track these changes as our designs evolve. Most organizations do this through a revision table. 

Exploded views are a great way to show all the components in your assembly, and explode lines help to explain how they fit together. In SOLIDWORKS 2017 it was easy to create explode lines, but if you had many different components and many instances of those components, the process could become a bit tedious. You had to create explode lines for every single component, and for every instance as well. 

I’ve always felt that mating components in an assembly was one of the most exciting parts of creating my designs in SOLIDWORKS. After putting in all the work to build up the individual components, I was finally able to see how they would all interact. SOLIDWORKS gives us so many unique tools to check for interference or collisions and simulate the motion of our components. Putting my parts together in an assembly is the point in the design when everything starts to come to life.

With so many new enhancements, it’s hard to decide which SOLIDWORKS 2018 features to try first. If you work with multiple CAD systems, consider adding SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2018 to the top of your must-try list. Here's why the new Smart Capture feature is a TriMech favorite!

Designers and engineers already love sketching in SOLIDWORKS because its the foundation for most 3D models. But what if they could take these sketch tools and make their design cycle more efficient? Now, they can.

With new advancements in SOLIDWORKS 2018, users can save loads of time by mirroring 3D geometry and planes in sketches. Here’s how:

Model Based Definition (MBD) is becoming more and more prevalent in today's designs.  Through SOLIDWORKS MBD and the DimXpert tool, we can add our dimension and tolerance data directly to the 3D model, helping to eliminate the need for 2D drawings, while more effectively communicating our designs. Keep reading to learn how SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2018 now allows us to utilize this information to create first article inspection reports right from the 3D model.