Entries from November 2006 ↓

SolidWorks 2007 SP2 is now available for download at the Customer Portal.

I’ll be installing it first thing next week since I have a few SPRs that are supposed to be addressed in it.

We have been running SolidWorks 2007 for almost a month now and I have been really happy so far.  As with any release I have run into a few annoying bugs, but for me, the enhancements have far outweighed any problems I have had thus far.  The last two days I have been working on a fairly complex plastic part for a client and have LOVED the ability to save the file while in rollback mode!  Our group has also had some work documenting electrical schematics and cables and so far, the new drawing block capabilities have really saved some time!

Stay tuned for more reviews and tidbits coming in December…..

Autodesk has sued the Open Design Alliance over the 2007 .DWG file format.  AECNews has a good article with details.

Rob Rodriguez has started an interesting discussion related to this talking about data exchange in the CAD World.  Check out Rob’s post by clicking here.

What does this mean for all the companies that are members of the ODA?  I guess only time will tell…..

For those of you that use the Weldment functionality in SolidWorks, there is a nice little enhancement that has been included in SolidWorks 2007.

The Structural Member functionality in Weldments allows you quickly create weldment frames using a multi-body approach. If you need to detail a specific body in a drawing the drawing view creation is a bit different since you are creating views of a specific solid body in a part file. To create these drawing view(s) the Relative View command is invoked . In the past this worked very well for parts with at least two non-parallel planar faces. If you were trying to detail a part with one or no non-parallel planar faces (a circular tube is a good example) it was impossible to orient the solid body for the drawing view due to the lack of planar faces. In SolidWorks 2007, you can now use reference planes to help orient the part.

Click HERE for a video demonstration of Relative Views in SolidWorks 2007.