SOLIDWORKS Video Tech Tips

With each year the reverse engineering toolset in SOLIDWORKS expands and gets more powerful every time. Over the last few years, we have seen some amazing reverse engineering functionalities added to SOLIDWORKS Standard, Professional and Premium. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we share with you how you can take advantage of these reverse engineering tools.

In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we introduce the Silhouette Entities tool in SOLIDWORKS 2020. This powerful tool can be used to create an outline of your model. Think of it as convert entities on steroids. With this feature, you can easily create a projected outline of your parts and assemblies similar to convert entities – just much more powerful and easy.

Do you want to learn how to use surface modeling? Here’s our first step to get started. Surface modeling is an alternative to solid body modeling. Essentially, it’s just another tab at the top of the SOLIDWORKS User Interface. Surface modeling is an important tool to have in your box because it not only makes modeling easier, it sometimes makes modeling possible. In other words, there’s some geometry that is impossible to create without using surface features. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we show you how to get started with surface modeling in SOLIDWORKS.

The Belt and Chain command is an advanced assembly feature that is great for easily connecting components together such as pullies or gears. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we’ll walk you through the process of using these large assembly commands in SOLIDWORKS.

Fillets, or rounds, are an essential modeling feature, but even though it's basic, it doesn't mean it can't hold advanced functionality. In this week's Video Tech Tip, we are going to show you how to leverage the advanced functionality of fillets and another little-known feature to help save a lot of time when you're designing in SOLIDWORKS.

As the models get larger and more complicated, we turn to section views to expose inner details and help us easily share our designs. Section views are core part of the SOLIDWORKS toolset so much so that they are taught in the first day of SOLIDWORKS Essentials. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we are going to showcase section views. We are going to show you how to use some great tools that were added to the section view toolset in previous years that allow you to easily create great-looking section views

When it comes to creating sketches, we’re often looking for faster ways to do our daily tasks like editing or dimensioning. SOLIDWORKS gives us the power to speed those tasks through the Auto-Rotate and Numeric Screen Input system options. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we will share with you how you can use them to speed up your sketching in SOLIDWORKS.

Creating your 3D model begins with a good 2D sketch, the foundation of models in SOLIDWORKS. One of the core concepts when working with sketches is using relations to help define the position of sketch geometry. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we take an in-depth look at one of the more advanced relations – pierce.

Using layers can save time when it comes to your drawings. They act as a grouping to speed up formatting for your drawing information. Layers contain information about an annotation’s color, font and thickness. They can also be hidden from view on drawings and from prints. Check out this week’s Video Tech Tip to see how to create a layer and modify its properties.