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There are many reasons to celebrate as we head into the last stretch of the Spring months. For most of us in the northern US and Canada, we look forward to the Spring bloom, warming weather and spending more time outside! One of our favorite Spring holidays is Cinco de Mayo, so we’ve put together a fun animation of ‘Dancing Margaritas’ to kick off the celebration!

Our engineers are constantly learning, experimenting and discovering new ways to get things done better inside SOLIDWORKS. We want to share everything we've mastered and teach you real-world techniques that can be implemented immediately in your processes. This was the main idea behind our TriMech Tech Talks 2021 Engineer Insight, and now you can watch them on-demand!

So many improvements in SOLIDWORKS 2021, so little time! With the vast amount of upgrades and additions they make each year, it can be overwhelming trying to sift through them all, and often, useful tools and changes are missed. To ensure you are getting the most of your software, we are providing eight on-demand webinars full of demonstrations, updates, explanations and explorations of SOLIDWORKS. 

Whenever a holiday comes around, I like to get creative in SOLIDWORKS as you can see from a previous article I created for Halloween a few years ago. For Independence Day, I wanted to raise the flag in SOLIDWORKS! This provided a great opportunity for me to create a rendering and show you the differences between PhotoView360, SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard and Visualize Professional.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize has a great selection of material appearances right out of the box. It allows users to improve upon the standard SOLIDWORKS appearances and make their renderings look amazing. More choices are never a bad thing, and in 2019, SOLIDWORKS added support for NVIDIA MDL materials to SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Almost everybody loves chocolate, right? That’s exactly what I was thinking when I was working on some models for our previous Halloween and Christmas candy articles. As I was working on those projects, I came across a surprisingly quick and easy way to apply full-color patterned textures to CAD models for 3D printing on the Stratasys J750 and J850, using SOLIDWORKS Visualize, and had the idea to use this method to make chocolate bars for Valentine’s Day!

We hear a lot about going from concept to design, and with SOLIDWORKS CAD that’s the easy part. But what’s next? What tools do you need to pitch your design and get that first prototype made? In other words, what tools do you need to go from concept to reality?

Once you have your CAD complete in SOLIDWORKS, the three tools that help you make a concept a reality are: SOLIDWORKS Composer, SOLIDWORKS Visualize and SOLIDWORKS Visualize Pro. With these tools you can showcase how your design will look and how it will work, capturing the essence of your idea before it’s even made. The best part is these are all linked to the SOLIDWORKS CAD model, meaning any changes to the model are automatically updated; saving you substantial time and frustrating effort.

All three tools put your model on a stage so you can easily share your designs, but what exactly are the differences? In this article, we break down each of the features of the tools, so you can know exactly why and when to use them.

It’s the holiday season and many of us are getting into the spirit by decorating our homes and escaping the cold. In this blog, I’ll be using a clever method of combining projects in SOLIDWORKS Visualize to quickly transform an empty living room into a warm and cozy winter escape that we’ll bring to life with a rendering.

It's probably needless for me to say that technology is ever evolving. It’s amazing to see where we’ve come in the last 20 years when looking at the computers we work with and how we communicate, play and work. In the past five years, we've seen two areas that have been gaining a lot of traction: virtual and augmented reality technology (VR/AR). It’s fair to say that we’ve seen huge leaps in VR/AR when comparing even the last five years to the last twenty. Certainly, the underlying technologies like high-speed graphics, high-definition mobile displays and high capacity batteries have contributed to this boom, but also the diversity of applications the technology has brought to users. CAD seemed like a natural fit for VR/AR applications. Let’s take a look at what SOLIDWORKS has done with VR/AR over the years and where it looks to take it into the future.