Video Tech Tips

With PhotoView 360 you can take your 3D models and turn them into images so real you won’t be able to tell the difference between a photograph and the rendering. But to be able to take your models and turn them into photographs, you’ll need to take care of all the details. When it comes to renderings in SOLIDWORKS PhotoView 360, the details matter. In this week's Video Tech Tip we'll share with you the bloom effects which really add a great deal of realism to your model. 

SOLIDWORKS offers an extremely robust set of tools that enable an efficient workflow for designing anything your mind can think of; consumer products, weldments and sheet metal parts. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we'll go over the patterning tools that can be used to help you save a lot of time to add details to your design.

One of the most useful and insightful tools in SOLIDWORKS is Assembly Visualization. It provides users with different ways to display and sort an assembly’s components in an easy to understand list as well as in the graphics area. 

There are countless ways the information can be shown and sorted to help you gain a deeper understanding of your assembly in no time at all. Assembly Visualization works by visualizing and listing properties or metadata of your model. This can be basic numerical data such as component mass, density and volume, but it can also be more complex, non-calculated custom properties such as Vendor, Bought/Sold or Status.

With every release of SOLIDWORKS there are hundreds of enhancements added, both big and small. Some of these enhancements are little time savers while others are huge game changers. One thing’s for sure, as you’re busy getting your job done it’s tough to keep up with all of the enhancements year after year. Sometimes we find that SOLIDWORKS users are so wrapped up in their day to day modeling that they miss some of the new features. Although these features might not be exactly new to SOLIDWORKS, they could be new to you. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we take a look back and showcase some of the best additions to SOLIDWORKS sketching.

When it comes to your assemblies, one of the most important things is to be able to convey the big picture idea. This mostly means showing how it is put together and how it functions. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create an explode animation. But creating complete explode animations in SOLIDWORKS can sometimes be time-consuming and frustratingly tedious. With SOLIDWORKS Composer, creating a complex explode animation is super easy. In this week's Video Tech Tip, Application Engineer Mike Souders shows us how.

This week’s Video Tech Tip is all about virtual components; what they are, why they’re great and how to use them. So, what are virtual components all about? Virtual components are used for assembly modeling in SOLIDWORKS and they are special parts because they are saved internally in the assembly file instead of in a separate part or subassembly file. This means they only exist inside the assembly and not physically on the hard drive somewhere. At any time, a virtual component can be saved to an external file. You’ve probably seen this message at some point in your SOLIDWORKS modeling career.

While most users now have access to SOLIDWORKS Visualize, it can be a daunting task to switch to a different platform to render your parts. PhotoView 360 is included in the SOLIDWORKS Professional and SOLIDWORKS Premium seats, and lets you set up a quick rendering without having to switch programs. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we’ll share with you our favorite tips for rendering in PhotoView 360.

When modeling in SOLIDWORKS, oftentimes we leave our fillets and rounds for last. This is a great practice that makes sure you get your model geometry set before adding cosmetic or machining features. This can also lead to frustration, as you’ve just modeled a very complex part, but the fillet just won’t work. This is where FilletXpert can help. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we’ll show you how FilletXpert works.

If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video of a SOLIDWORKS guru or even looked over your coworker’s shoulder, you might've noticed that not everybody uses the same display settings for SOLIDWORKS. This can be done to reduce eye strain, match with a previous CAD software or just because it looks cooler. In this week’s Video Tech Tip we’ll walk you through the process of customizing your display settings.

While Delete Hole might not be the most glamorous addition to the SOLIDWORKS 2019 enhancements portfolio, there are plenty of surfacing users who are very excited about this new feature. Deleting a hole from a solid body is fairly simple with the Delete Face and Fill Command but deleting a hole from a surface body doesn’t have the same workflow because there is no face to select. In this Video Tech Tip, we’ll walk you through the process of deleting a hole in a solid figure.

In this week's Video Tech Tip we'll go over our top five favorite keyboard shortcuts in SOLIDWORKS. These are, in our opinion, the most time-saving commands that every SOLIDWORKS user should appreciate.

Creating multiple fillets in a single feature is something I’m asked about often. Typically, the user has seen it in a different 3D CAD software other than SOLIDWORKS or would like to unclutter their feature tree. This is also a very useful skill to quickly simplify your parts for assembly performance or simulation by allowing you to only suppress one feature. In this Video Tech Tip, we’ll show you how to create multiple fillets in one feature.