SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1 (Jan 21) A Commanding Presence

One of the stars that kept popping up all over the place at SWW8 was the famous/infamous Matt Lombard.  As mentioned, I attended his Hybrid Modeling breakout session.  Before showing up, I didn’t know what to expect.  First of all, his breakout session was in one of the large rooms, that could seat possibly  500 people.  I don’t really know.  I know it was pretty full in comparison to other sessions this year.  I’m not going to go into too much detail about the session’s agenda since I covered that already.  Instead, there are other items of note. 

In a moment of surreal quality, right in the middle of an audience member asking him a question, Matt recognizes him and declares something along the line, “I’ve been looking all over for you! I have it right here.”  He then proceeds to find a copy of his SolidWorks book and brings it down to his faithful attendee.  At the same time, I see a hand reach out from the front row or so grasping some amount of dollar bills.  Matt makes the exchange, declaring some self-derogatory statement and continues the presentation. 

This photo here is of Matt lording over the model he is about to render subservient to his will.

Lord Lombard commanding his model

Two other moments came up where he recognized others in the audience (if I remember right, SolidWorks perennials of some sort)  and declared his complete amazement that they where there listening to little ol’ him.  Just because you write a highly regarded book about SolidWorks doesn’t preclude you from being in awe of others.

The session was informative and entertaining in the shear unexpected natural phenomenon known as Matt Lombard. 

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1 (Jan 21) Breakouts and Such

Though the breakfasts at SWW8 left a lot to be desired, I have to say the food serviced at the lunches was enjoyable.  One of the things that SWW8 organizers tried to do was set up tables for lunch with particular themes, called Birds of a Feather.  Basically, each day, the cafeteria was laid out with tables in particular areas being labelled with particular interests.  One day the tables were labelled based on SolidWorks software related interests.  Another day, the cafeteria was divided into industry genre.  The last day was divided into regions of the U.S. and the World.  Honestly, it didn’t make a dang bit of difference to me.  Two out of the three days, I sat pretty randomly anyway.  The one day I did sit where I was supposed didn’t turn out all that interesting to me (no offense to the people at the table with me).

 On my first day of SWW8, my breakout sessions where actually not directly SolidWorks related.  The first breakout session I attended covered Advanced Project Management Concepts.  I choose this session originally because other available sessions at the same slot were either topics I already know well enough, or were not related to me at all.  I didn’t expect much from this particular session.  I was surprised.  I’m glad I was in attendance.  The session was kinda an eye opener covering topics in project management including criticisms of and improvement upon the critical path method, the root causes for scheduling issues, bad behavior that I have always thought was good behavior (multi-tasking), Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time available for its completion), 3 Minute Egg Rule (sarcastically: it’s not quality if its finish before time is up), and the CYA factor.  The session then addressed the true nature of projects and discussed methods to use in order to plan projects more effectively.  Out of all my breakout sessions, this is the one where I took the most notes (and that wasn’t because it was the first one I attended).

I then attended the breakout session labelled Clarifying Software Tools and Regulatory Compliance.  I work in a heavily regulated industry, and have been grappling with the question of how to treat SolidWorks within that environment.  Is SolidWorks and related applications subject to validation requirements.  The answer I found here was no!  SolidWorks and its related applications are authoring tools.  Drawings can be document of record in the Device History File, but they can be so in the form of formats like PDF or TIFF.  My company already treats the PDFs of drawings as the controlled document, so this fits well within our processes without the risk of having cumbersome activities limit the use of SolidWorks in some artificial way.

Hybrid Modeling Solids and Surfaces was the next breakout session I attended on Monday.  This session was conducted by Matt Lombard.  This session revolved around the idea of using good practices to create models that employed both surfacing and solid modelling.  He discussed the sequential method where one starts out creating a part as surface model and then becomes a solid model.  This is accomplished by grouping all of the surface features at the start of the Feature Manager, and grouping the solid features at the bottom.  This method produces a well organized tree, but may be difficult to maintain if certain features which blur the boundaries of surface and solid modelling are used.  The alternative is simultaneous hybrid modelling, that has a combined use of solids and surfaces throughout the Feature Manager tree.  He also went into details about many of the surface and solid modelling tools.  Seeing many of the SolidWorks tools demonstrated was enough to make this time well spent.  I briefly met Matt at the end.  We previously have had some correspondences regarding a particular topic du jour: HM, CF, RC1, RC2, & RC3.

I went to my final session of the day on a whim.  I had intended on going to a session that covered the topic of PDMWorks and API or something.  However, it was across the building, and this session was just down the hall.  Welcome to the 9th Annual SolidWorks User Group Network Summit Meeting.  The attendees of these meeting turns out to be a who’s who in the SolidWorks universe.  Many of us Blog Squad members where there, but the focus of the group was the SWUGN and its leadership.  I was first introduced to this level of activity by a personal invite from Richard Doyle to attend a SWUGN Regional Technical Summit in 2007.  Before that, I had been to a couple of SWUG meetings over the years and that’s about it.  The one thing that strikes me as quirky and yet endearing is Richard Doyle’s pronunciation of the letters S-W-U-G-N and how they just roll off his tongue.  It’s not swu-jen, or swoo-jen, or swu-gun, or even swug-in.  He pronounces the g as in begin, not as a j like in giant.  He easily utters swu-gin in a way that may take other English speakers years to master.  

 The session was very informative as to the progress and goals for the SWUGN in 2007 and throughout 2008.  As the day come to a close, I headed off to recoop in preparation for the long day to come.

How to add Watermark to SolidWorks Drawing (with linked value)

How to add a Watermark to SolidWorks Drawings
By Matthew Lorono
For whatever reason, watermarks are sometimes necessary, even on drawings. Since SolidWorks has no watermark feature, and does not allow the user to change the order of certain drawing entities, a workaround is necessary. Here the most effective and powerful method useful for Drawing Templates and Sheet Formats.
1. Open the drawing.
2. Create a drawing layer by choosing the layer icon.

Layer Toolbar

3. Change the layer name and description to something identifiable.Then click on the color block in the Color column and choose a very light color.Select OK.

Layer Window

4. Goto pulldown menu File and select Properties.
5. Add the property Watermark.As a place holder, give this property the value of “PRELIMINARY” or something similar.
6. Edit Sheet Format.
7. Use Annotation Note to create and place the entity that will become the watermark.
8. Edit the properties of that Note to adjust its font, angle, size, etc as desired.Then, link the Note to the custom property Watermark, as shown in the figure.Select OK.

Annotation Note Properties Window

8. Change the layer of the Note to the newly created layer.

**UPDATE: New functionality in SolidWorks 2013 makes steps 9 and 9.5 no longer necessary, please see this article for details: Sometimes it’s the little new things – Watermarking **
9. Right Mouse Button click on the Note and select Make Block and accept.
9.5. Due to some funky behavior that I’ve discovered by SolidWorks when loading a watermarked template into an existing drawing, I’m adding this one step: Once you make the block, change the layer of the block to the same layer you set for your Note.
10. Save the Sheet Format (under pulldown menu File and select Save Sheet Format).
11. Edit Sheet.The Note will now appear underneath all other objects on the Drawing Sheet.
12. Save this document as a Drawing Template (under pulldown menu File and select “Save As”, then change Save as type to “Drawing Templates”).This creates both the Drawing Template and Sheet Format with an embedded watermark.To change the text of the watermark in any drawings that use the Drawing Template, simply go back to Files>Properties, and edit its text value.To remove the watermark, simply replace the current value with a space.These instructions are geared towards SolidWorks 2007 or earlier. SolidWorks 2008 or later instructions will be similar, though how to access some of the functions may have changed.

SolidWorks World 2008 Animation

SolidWorks World 2008 Inspired to Design VEXplorer Video from Solidsmack on Vimeo.

This was the introduction animation (linked above) used each day at the start of the General Session.  In a presentation with Jeff Ray, VEXplorer was introduced.  This is a Student Design Kit where kids of ages 10 and up can build their own robot, and design other variations with the Student Edition of SolidWorks, which is now provided for free with the robot kit.  Honestly, I wasn’t that impressed with the robot itself.  I saw the live demonstration of the robot in the Partners Pavilion.  It would be fun for one or two uses for one or two times.  I don’t see what would keep the average kid coming back to it.  However, it is a start in the right direction to help inspire kids to explore design at a younger age.  It is certainly a good way to expose kids to SolidWorks as the preferred software for accomplishing engineering tasks.

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1: The General Session

Each day of SolidWorks World kicks off with a General Session.  Each day had surprises.  Of course, to experience all of this requires getting up early enough in the morning.  The crowd quickly filled up the area outside of the General Session auditorium of the San Diego Convention Center.  Even on the first day, I developed quite the talent of surfing through the crowds to get closer to the doors into the General Session auditorium to get a good seat when the door swung open.

 Outside the General Session, NorthCrowd outside of General Session, South

It was standing room only in the General Session.  Even with thousands of seats, hundreds of people where left standing.  Estimates ranged over 4700 attendees.

General Session, facing the stage 1 General Session, facing stage 2

General Session, facing doors

On Monday, the surprise guest was Danny Forster, whose trademark is expressing his deep fear of heights.  He is the host of Built it Bigger on Discovery Channel, and a prominent architect and engineer.  Despite the fact that he did give a rather interesting and engaging presentation that discussed everything from home design to the marriage of architecture and engineering that went into the University of Phoenix Stadium, I am surprised he didn’t get booed off of the stage early on as he made it a point to state that he used AutoCAD to design one of his buildings.  SolidWorks users must be a more forgiving bunch than I would’ve thought.  I know he did it on purpose; the rat.

KIVA Systems made an interesting presentation where they showed off a robotic system that replaces the need to send people into a factory to retrieve items.  Another robot highlighted at the conference in the SolidWorks intro animation was of a robot being designed and built.  It turned out that this robot is a built-it-yourself kit and being sold for the ages 10 and up crowd.  Included with the robot is SolidWorks Student Edition!  Talk about hooking the kids young!  More on this later on.

There was another surprise on Monday; one that was both fascinating and a bit scary at the same time. See, there’s this guy named Theo Jansen.  He is a kinetic sculptor that builds “Beach Beasts”, based on skeleton like designs that are powered by nothing more than the wind.  He’s designed the creatures (as he also called them) to become so sophisticated, they are able to mechanically sense their environment, and mechanically respond to it.  For example, if one of these creatures walks up to the ocean’s edge, it knows to start going the other way to avoid the water.  It does this without the use of any electronics at all.  It’s all plastic tubing.  During his presentation, Mr. Jansen appeared to be one of those people that successively balances the line between genius and insanity.  However, off stage was a different story.  I talked to some of the facilities contractors for SolidWorks World 2008 later that night at one of the local bars.  They where the crew that helped Mr. Jansen assembly one of the creatures for an on-stage demonstration.  Those fellows couldn’t wait to tell me that they think he had crossed well into the realm of insanity, often talking about his creations as though they where actual pets; and that he wanted his creatures to survive long after he passed on.  He was definately the most provocative presenter during the Monday session.  The video about him is too long to post here, so check out this YouTube link.

At the end of the General Session, everyone filed out into convention center’s maze of hallways, filtering into the many different Breakout sessions, Hands-on sessions and the Partners Pavilion.

Lorono’s SolidWorks Resources

This is minor announcement about Lorono’s SolidWorks Resources.  This is my website with tons of SolidWorks related file downloads, weblinks, tips, tricks, etc.  Recently, I improved functionality of the site so that when new content is added, notification will appear on the homepage.  This will allow for easier navigation to areas where new content is added.  Of course, all content is still easily accessable by exploring the site’s many areas directly.