DimXpert at SolidWorks World 2014
DimXpert presentations seemed to get a lot of interest at SolidWorks World 2014. Both sessions I attended had full rooms.
All The Uses of DimXpert, a Monday morning session by Josh Spencer of 3DVision Technologies was over flowing with interested attendees. Josh went into detail about what to use DimXpert for and how to use it. He described how to leverage DimXpert in TolAnalyst and SolidWorks Drawings.
Introduction to DimXpert and Tolanalyst, a Monday afternoon session by Brian McElyea of Intuitive Research and Technology Corporation was also a full session, not just with hands-on attendees, but also observers from the session’s wait list. Brian walked attendees through hands-on usage of DimXpert and TolAnalyst with a castor assembly.
DimXpert was also featured in several Model Based Definition break-out sessions, including my own presentation on Wednesday called Model Based Definition in the Context of SolidWorks, where I went into detail about the various methods used to employ Model Based Definition and how to set up and use SolidWorks for best results.
I am interested to see how others are interested in DimXpert. Was the interest shown at SolidWorks World 2014 a fluke or indicative of general interest within Industry?
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
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
What’s New in SolidWorks Drawings in Recent Years by Nikhil Kulkarni – This presentation focuses on showing recent tools/enhancements added to SolidWorks in the area of drawings and DXF/DWG.
The United States Government Loves Model-based Definition by Rich Eckenrode – This presentation is on the NIST project, PMI conformance testing models. He will describe the use of SOLIDWORKS in this PMI validation project. He will also touch on SolidWorks ability to compete in the space MBD and review some of the interesting facts with regard to using MBD in SolidWorks.
Drawing Templates: How and Why! by Jeremiah Griffith – Learn how to create functional and automated drawing templates to reduce redundant information entry. Make SOLIDWORKS work for you, and ease your life by using the tools provided!
First Article Reports and Inspection Documentation with SolidWorks by Mathieu Fourcade – Experience how easy it can be to create inspection documentation for first article or quality assurance purposes using SolidWorks. Dramatically reduce the time required to create inspection documentation and eliminate errors inherent to the manual “ballooning” of engineering drawings as well as in the creation of inspection reports.
3D MBD (Model-based Design) and MBE (Model-based Enterprise) State of the Union by Christopher Garcia and Paul Perreault – Learn how Anark has been helping the DoD and several manufacturing companies for over four years to lead the way into a 3D model-based enterprise. The initiative eliminates the need for 2D drawings in favor of 3D PDF and 3D HTML technical data packages. This session will review this progress.
Making Custom Symbols by Nikhil Kulkarni – See how to make custom symbols in SolidWorks.