SolidWorks 2001.(Evaluation)

Windows-based solid modeler gets overhaul

THE MID-RANGE MCAD market resembles a game of leapfrog as companies such as Autodesk, SolidWorks, and UGS continue to improve Inventor, SolidWorks, and Solid Edge, respectively. Users come out as the winners in this battle as the rivals update their software at an impressive rate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in SolidWorks 2001, the latest release of the company's flagship product. And the most significant changes this time around are readily apparent, with a redesigned user interface that makes what was already an easy-to-use program even more intuitive.

SolidWorks has been systematically revising its user interface over the past several releases, and SolidWorks 2001 is the culmination of those efforts. Virtually all dialog boxes have been replaced by an updated Property Manager that contains all design properties and parameters in a panel area adjacent to the model.

The new release also adds context-sensitive callouts that appear within the model or drawing display. These help distinguish between different entities and provide information, such as extrusion depth or fillet radius, that can be changed directly on screen. New handles enable you to click and dynamically move to change parameters.

The revised Property Manager provides buttons for confirming or canceling an action. These are repeated in the new Confirmation Corner, a large graphical indicator in the upper-right-hand corner of the drawing window. When a user is sketching, this area changes to an Exit Sketch icon. Little touches such as these make it easier to work in SolidWorks 2001.

In its last major revision, SolidWorks concentrated on improvements to sketching and surfacing. This time, the product offers more powerful part, feature, and assembly modeling capabilities. Users can create sweeps with multiple contours, and a new thin feature option enables the creation of sweeps and lofts with thin walls in a single step. These two capabilities make it easier than ever to create complex tube and pipe shapes.

A new tangency control also enables you to control the tangency magnitude between sketches, faces, or edges on surfaces when lofting. When creating feature patterns, you can now skip pattern instances when building the pattern. In the past, you had to create the feature pattern, then delete pattern instances individually.