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SolidWorks World 2014: Day 4 – Wednesday General Session – Product Definition

General Session

The General Session for Wednesday was as entertaining as ever. Most the details from Wednesday General Session have already been well covered by other blogs and online outlets. I’m going to focus on Bruce Holway’s presentation instead. It is important to me because he’s describing the his group (Product Definition of which I am apart) and past years SolidWorks World Top Ten enhancements list. He states that the vast majority of past year’s Top Ten have been implemented. He covers many of recent examples.

Default to Concentric Mate when two selected faces are cylindrical
Default to Parallel Mate when two selected faces have other geometry that prevent coincident mating
Lock Option for Concentric Mates so that additional mates are not required to stop rotation of a cylindrical part
Slot Mate
Center of Mass reference geometry
Fix Edge Bleed Thru display, where thin walled features sometimes displayed fragments of obscured features
Don’t Delete Child Features, Dangle them Instead when deleting a parent feature
eDrawings for Android

Also mentioned is the fact that we visit hundreds of customers each year at their sites to understand how they are using SolidWorks. This is extremely valuable in determining how we plan to improve our product offerings by giving us first hand experiences from our customers.

This year’s SolidWorks World Top Ten list:

Auto-hide components
Draw a line segment starting from the mid-point
Equal spacing option for linear patterns
Ability to rename a part or sub-assembly in the feature tree
Unlimited undo/redo
Pressing the ESC key should immediately stop the current calculation and return control to the user
Fillets and chamfers should be managed by the same feature
Ability to flip angle dimensions after they have been placed
Hole callout should include all instances on the same face
New Purge command

SolidWorks World 2014 Day 3 – Tuesday

User Community and Beta Highlights from General Session
Tuesday General Sessions tends to focus on the user community. Richard Doyle has become a fixture on the big stage as he gives us the SolidWorks User Group Network updates. This year he announced the following awards.

2013 User Group of the Year is San Diego SolidWorks User Group, awarded to leaders Phil Sluder and Jim Boland
2013 Wayne Tiffany Group Leader of the Year is awarded to Jeff Holliday
2013 Michelle Pillers Community Award is awarded to Deepak Gupta

The SolidWorks Beta program for SolidWorks 2014 is the most successful yet. Here are this year’s winners for the program

Customers:

Bettina Walker, SolidWorks
Yoshihiro Dobashi, Simulation
Masanobu Higashino, EPDM
Muneki Okano, Composer

VARs:

Michael Malov of SolidWorks Russia, SolidWorks
Charley Saint of Hawkridge Systems, EPDM
Andrey Aliamovsky of SolidWorks Russia, Simulation
Ludmila Staroverova of SolidWorks Russia and Scott Woods of Hawkridge Systems, Composer

My Hands-on Presentation
I conducted my first Hands-on Session of this year’s conference on Tuesday evening, covering the topic of drawing views. This is a new presentation at SolidWorks World. Though the presentation is intended for beginners and novice users, by going through all of the view types, even experienced users learned something they have forgotten or missed before. Several attendees showed (by a raise of heads) they learned something new from several of the exercises throughout the presentation. I may expand the presentation to cover additional topics, such as the new Replace Model in SolidWorks 2014.

SolidWorks World 2014: Day 1, Day 2 Monday General Session – Mechanical Conceptual revealed

I'm an employee and also a member of the Bacon Brotherhood SolidWorks World 2014 is going strong. Sunday was a great time to catch up with old friends and meet a lot of new people. Many people are lucky enough to have joined the Bacon Brotherhood, including yours truly. For more details, see Twitter and search #baconbrotherhood.

This year’s SolidWorks World reached the record of 5600+ attendees on Monday! That is a new record, which is especially important since Monday (though technically Day 2) is really the first full day of the conference (often the number goes even higher by Tuesday).

The Monday General session was well reviewed by Brian McElyea of CAD Fanatic. Briefly, the morning was largely dedicated to SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual (SWMC) with a great presentation by Aaron Kelly, VP of User Experience and Product Portfolio Management and Kishore Boyalakuntla, Director of User Experience and Product Portfolio Management. They demonstrated a case where customers and vendors can work collaboratively to quickly develop new mechanical concepts on a common CAD model using social interaction and advanced design software. Brian then notes,

Representatives of four of the lighthouse companies (TriAxial Design and Analysis, Kennedy Hygiene Products Limited, Karl W. Schmidt & Associates, and J.G. WEISSER SÖHNE GmbH & Co. KG) that have been using the product over the last few months were then brought out and gave their thoughts on the software.

“Lighthouse” is a term that refers to real customers who are earlier adopters by invitation. They get a preview of functionality while an application is near completion but before it is made available to everyone. Lighthouse customers use the application in their real world enterprise on actual projects, and provide important feedback for further improvements.

Additional news is SolidWorks Industrial Conceptual was announced with a brief teaser. This generated a lot of excitement.

For a preview of Tuesday, see Michael Lord’s photoblog.

Drawings and Detailing are getting a lot of attention this year @ SolidWorks World 2014

Drawings and Detailing are getting a lot of attention this year at SolidWorks World 2014 in breakout and hands-on sessions. There are enough sessions here to fill the schedule of anyone interested in modern drafting and SolidWorks capabilities. Check it out!

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SolidWorks World 2014 Floor Plan is up!

In recent years, a floor plan tool for the SolidWorks World has been available online ahead of the conference. This tool seems to be getting more useful every year.

This year’s floor plan as a full map of each floor of the conference, including conference rooms and the Partner Pavilion.

The Partner Pavilion map layouts exhibitor locations with a flyout that includes a company profile.

SolidWorks World 2014 is right around the corner

Breakout Sessions

SolidWorks World 2014 is only weeks away! As usually, this year’s conference is shaping up with a session schedule that is filled with great topics. These are a small sample of what is on the schedule as of January 8, 2014 (schedule is subject to change):

The Art of the Swoopy Part by Sal Lama. Gain exposure to the critical tools required to confidently model complex shapes. We’ll use numerous techniques, including sketch picture, splines, various surfacing features, and multibody to create consumer product designs.
Extra-large Assemblies by Adrian Velazquez. Learn some features, options, tips, and methods to squeeze performance and productivity out of assemblies that are more than large (think 200,000 components).
The Big GD&T Theory by Thomas Allsup. A humorous look at the various GD&T concepts used by SolidWorks designers to refine their geometric requirements..
Deliver the Right Part Efficiently with SolidWorks Composer by Kevin Mackay. A guide through the simple process of creating both 2D and 3D online interactive electronic parts catalogs (EPC) directly from the engineering data using SolidWorks Composer.
SolidWorks Tips You Need to Know! 3.0 by Ben Eadie. Increase the productivity of your everyday use with tips and tricks. As a 17-year SolidWorks user and the owner/operator of solidworkstips.com (SolidWorks Tips Daily) for the past 14 years, I know you can never learn all of SolidWorks. Parts, drawings, assemblies, and more will be discussed.
All the Uses of DimXpert by Josh Spencer. Learn how DimXpert creates 3D dimensions with tolerances. We will use TolAnalyst for tolerance stackups, view the dimensions in eDrawings, and also create a 2D drawing in a matter of seconds.

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