SolidWorks 2001: A design odyssey -- Sheet-metal design and surfacing become even easier.(Evaluation)

Publication: CADalyst

Publication Date: 01-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Questex Media Group, Inc.

In just six years SolidWorks has come a long way as a product and a company. The company virtually established the so-called midrange modeler as a serious contender in the 3D MCAD marketplace in North America. Now in its ninth major release, SolidWorks 2001 is a mature, stable product with more than 100,000 commercial and educational seats. Reviewing SolidWorks is both easy and difficult. Easy because improvements made to the base product are usually straightforward and obvious.

Difficult because of a myriad of complementary third-party software and the endless possibilities for Visual BASIC customization.

For this review, I installed SolidWorks 2001 on a Hewlett-Packard Visualize X-Class workstation with an 866MHz Pentium III CPU, 512MB RAM, ELSA GLoria II graphics card, and Windows NT 4 SP6. This platform proved to be ideally suited for 2D and 3D graphics work with individual parts and large assemblies.

Up front

SolidWorks put a lot of thought and effort into 2001's graphical user interface. It developed what it calls Heads-Up User Interaction to promote design efficiency--an effort that really began with SolidWorks 99. Heads-Up User Interaction reduces the number of dialog boxes you use, which frees up your design area. To further drive this point home, SolidWorks updated or moved more than 30 commands to the PropertyManager (more about the Property- Manager later). The result? Even fewer dialog boxes to contend with, although the interface can still get a bit busy.

Context-sensitive callouts shown in figure 1 are new graphical display elements that help you distinguish between different entities such as a sweep profile and a sweep path. These callouts display information such as relationships of sketch entities, labels for feature inputs, and different ways to change feature parameters. Unfortunately, although you can drag these callouts, you can't use them to actually change the properties of the entity to which they refer. Some callouts, however, such as those for extrusions, display numerical values that you can edit in the PropertyManager. When you do so, the callout and...

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