Video Tech Tips

When working in a 3D space like the SOLIDWORKS modeling environment, the view orientation and model manipulation are two of the key fundamental concepts. It’s the first thing you learn when starting to use the software. One of the most important view orientation tools is Normal To. Normal To is when you’re looking directly at the model and everything is straight and oriented properly. What’s great about this is that it makes it easy for us to visually understand the model. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we share with you some of the more advanced functionality of this fundamental tool to help you better take advantage of it and easily understand your model.

With every SOLIDWORKS part, there are front, top and right planes. But what do you do if those don’t line up with exactly what you want? In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we'll show you step by step how to change the orientation of your part file to line up exactly how you want. 

Within the SOLIDWORKS 2019 updates, there's a hub for everything you might want quick access to and it’s called the Welcome Screen. The Welcome Screen is a window that appears when you first launch SOLIDWORKS. From this interface, you have quick access to links, files, news and other useful items. In this week's Video Tech Tip, we'll show you how to take advantage of the Welcome Screen capabilities.

One of the little-known tools in SOLIDWORKS is the reload command, but we’re trying to get the word out about this powerful command you should be using.
In this week's Video Tech Tip, we'll show you how to use the reload command to undo mistakes in your designs. 

As the life cycle of your designs and your company evolve, you’ll find an ever-growing vastness of data created as a byproduct. One way to really get control of your company’s data is to use a data management tool like SOLIDWORKS PDM, the only tool built specifically for SOLIDWORKS. This means it understands the important relationships between files and enables you to work how you want with your data.

With SOLIDWORKS Motion you can animate your assemblies based on real physics. This next level realism takes your models from just an animation to a real movement, exactly like you’d see in the real world. That’s the big difference between animation and motion in SOLIDWORKS. In this Video Tech Tip, we focus on SOLIDWORKS Motion and how to use solid body contacts, which is the feature that makes it all possible.

What makes SOLIDWORKS such a powerful application is the sheer breadth of tools and utilities it offers designers. It would seem that the only limitation to what can be created in SOLIDWORKS is our imagination. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we share with you one of the little-known utilities found in SOLIDWORKS: the DrawCompare tool. This utility offers the functionality to compare many different compare tools that inspect your documents for differences and present you with an easy to follow report outlining any changes

We all know SOLIDWORKS is the most common choice for creating CAD models. Unfortunately, it’s not the only choice. The design ecosystem is full of different CAD software. Which is not a problem until you need to communicate with someone who is not on your version of SOLIDWORKS. This is a problem because when you can’t share a native SOLIDWORKS file with someone you’re forced to work with what we call an agnostic file format like a Step file. In this week’s Video Tech Tip we share with you how to leverage FeatureWorks to help make this process as streamlined as possible. 

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.