SolidWorks World 2014 Wednesday General Session Recap

The final general session of SolidWorks World 2014 kicked off with Mark Schneider revealing the winners of the 2014 Model Mania contest, where attendees are presented with a finished model and compete to see who can recreate and analyze the model from scratch the fastest. For this year, the winners in the customer category were Tom Smith (first place) from CHL Systems with a record time of 9:53, Andrew Lowe (second place) from DiMonte Group Inc., and Michael Wiggins (third place) from DeltaValve. The winners in the reseller category were Russell Richardson (first place) from Solid Solutions, Radoslav Zavrel (second place) from Schier Technik Slovakia s.r.o, and Jay Patterson (third place) from The SolidExperts. Winners of Model Mania will recieve NVIDIA K5000 graphics cards and an NVIDIA SHIELD.

The SolidWorks certification team took the stage next and revealed some big news. In 2014, SolidWorks is introducing three additional certifications: Certified SolidWorks Specialist – Mechanical Conceptual, Certified SolidWorks Associate – Mechanical Conceptual, and Certified Specialist – 3DEXPERIENCE Mechanical Conceptual. As of today, we have awarded over 100,000 certifications to users around the world. They also discussed some other upcoming news, which you can read about in Mike Puckett’s update from earlier today.

Marie Planchard with Mt. San Antonio College instructors talking about CSWA certifications
Marie Planchard with Mt. San Antonio College instructors talking about CSWA certifications

Marie Planchard, Director of Education, introduced instructors from Mt. San Antonio Community College, Max Lizarraga and Jerry Miranda, who offer the CSWA program to its students as part of their coursework. “For their final examinations, students are required to take the CSWA exam because it provides students with industry confirmation and makes it easier for them to get a job after they graduate” Max and Jerry said.

To date, there are over 600 institutions in over 36 countries offering the CSWA certification programs to their students. “Working with institutions, colleges, and universities such as MSAC gives me an emotional paycheck because I can see how students all over the world are developing their careers every day with the help of SolidWorks and our certification programs,” Marie said.

Bruce Holway took the stage next to reveal the results of the SolidWorks World 2014 Top Ten list. After the end of the voting period, the final results were as follows:

The Top 10 Enhancements in SolidWorks 2014
The Top 10 List in SolidWorks 2014
  1. Auto-hide components
  2. Draw a line segment starting from the mid-point
  3. Equal spacing option for linear patterns
  4. Ability to rename a part or sub-assembly in the feature tree
  5. Unlimited undo/redo
  6. Pressing the ESC key should immediately stop the current calculation and return control to the user
  7. Fillets and chamfers should be managed by the same feature
  8. Ability to flip angle dimensions after they have been placed
  9. Hole callout should include all instances on the same face
  10. New Purge command

The day ended with a look at what the product teams have coming up for SolidWorks 2015. We can’t tell you what they showed, so you’ll have to take our word for it that the beta release this summer should have some great stuff.

A sneak peek into the SolidWorks 2015 with CADman, Rib-In, and Ken Clayton
A sneak peek into the SolidWorks 2015 with CADman, Rib-In, and Ken Clayton

And with that, Bertrand took the stage to thank our Platinum Sponsors who made SolidWorks World 2015 possible: HP, Dell, Intel and NVIDIA. Bertrand also let everyone know that next year, we’ll be getting together in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. So mark your calendars for February 8-11th.

Looking forward to seeing all of you next year!

Matthew West

SolidWorks alumnus. I like plate reverb, Rat pedals, Thai curry, New Weird fiction, my kids, Vespas, Jazzmasters, my wife & Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not necessarily in that order.