The power trim tool is a favorite among SOLIDWORKS users. It’s a handy tool to cut away, trim or sketch geometry quickly. We affectionately call it the SOLIDWORKS weed wacker, because it works in mostly the same fashion. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you a little-known function of the power trim tool so you can leverage all of its functionality.
In your SOLIDWORKS designs, you can take advantage of pictures by inserting them into a sketch that can help you create your designs. But that’s nothing new. This functionality has been in SOLIDWORKS for many years. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you how to take advantage of the scale tool to accurately size the picture so that it is more useful as a design aid.
When it comes to successfully navigating around the 3D space and modeling environment in SOLIDWORKS, viewing and orienting your model is vital. As you use commands like pan, zoom and rotate to orient the model to take a measurement or add a feature, you are creating model views. We all know the feeling when you create the perfect model view-it’s the best. In this week’s Video Tech Tip we show you how to capture these views and save them so you can easily use them again.
Selecting items and geometric features in SOLIDWORKS used to often be tedious. With one misplaced click or unexpected move, you could lose all your selections. Fortunately there’s a tool in SOLIDWORKS that can help you get right back to where you were – Previous Selection. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you how to use this selection tool.
In SOLIDWORKS, there are two different ways to make selections: box and lasso. These selection tools make up a fundamental concept of working in SOLIDWORKS. Unfortunately, not everyone got the news that the lasso selection tool was added a few years ago to the SOLIDWORKS toolset, so, in this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you how to use this tool and some tips on how to make the most of the selection options.
The status bar in SOLIDWORKS is one of those tools that has been staring users in the face since day one but is often overlooked. It’s potentially the most underutilized tool in the software. It is the area of the interface in the lower right-hand corner that has all sorts of useful information that can help you speed up your design workflow, if you know how to use it. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you how to use the functionality of the status bar to instantly take measurements of your designs.
3D CAD, 3D Printing, Tech Tips
Creating Textures for 3D Printing Parts Using SOLIDWORKS
November 21, 2019
Creating textures for 3D printed parts is a great way to add a little extra realism as well as masking some of the layer lines present with a traditional FDM 3D printing system. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we’ll show you how to design textures for 3D printed parts in SOLIDWORKS.
Let’s get back to basics with this week’s Video Tech Tip, where we talk about the options in the Extruded Boss feature. This is probably the very first tool you learned to use when you started using SOLIDWORKS, and for good reason. It’s one of the most useful, fundamental tools in the software. Check out this video where we go over the extrude options and how to use them.
If you have components that don’t quite line up right, don’t sweat it. You can add misaligned mates in SOLIDWORKS in a breeze. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you how.
SOLIDWORKS is full of features that help save time and enable you to design faster. One of the most popular of these features is the patterning toolset. These tools enable you to copy an existing feature in various ways, saving you from having to recreate them. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we will share with you one of the most powerful, yet underutilized patterning tools, the sketch driven pattern.
The feature freeze bar is a great tool in SOLIDWORKS that can be used to help improve model rebuilds. It helps optimize the performance of your models. The tool is especially useful if you’re having long rebuild times or even if you’re experiencing some stability issues whenever you're working on a model.
When you are using sketch commands in SOLIDWORKS you’ll notice that they are persistent. This means that once a command is activated you need to deliberately exit the command by doing something like hitting or double-clicking the escape key. This is the default behavior in SOLIDWORKS. However, sometimes this is not the quickest way to work. So, there’s another way called single command per pick. With this option turned on, along with double-clicking to activate the command, you can have a lot more control over how you use the sketch commands in SOLIDWORKS. To see this functionality in action, check out this week’s Video Tech Tip where we walk you through how to take advantage of this option.