America's Top Modeler Previews SOLIDWORKS 2018

For the final act of SOLIDWORKS World 2017 General Session, the Product Introduction Team delivered the highly anticipated Technology Preview to show off some of the new functionality our developers are working hard to deliver in the SOLIDWORKS 2018 release. The long-standing Day 3 tradition of producing “infotainment” for our user community took a few new turns this year…here’s a quick recap…

For the 2017 version we took the skit down the path of why everyone ultimately comes to Los Angeles: to be discovered with fame and fortune to follow! With this in mind we turned the skit into a contest with each contestant delivering their most compelling performance with SOLIDWORKS. Our skit began back in December 2016 with tryouts and while there were many outstanding performances, there were only four spots in the finals. Rumor has it the contest was fixed and the finalists were chosen in advance, but this is simply untrue.

Lord Percy Buckingham-Smythe, our first finalist, delivered an outstanding performance showing off sketching enhancements every user will enjoy.

Mirror 3D Sketch Entities – When in a 3D Sketch you can now Mirror Sketch Entities

Sketch Planes as Symmetry Reference – 2D and 3D sketch entities can now be mirrored using a plane as the symmetry reference

Pen Sketching – Draw contours by freehand sketching using a pen or stylus on Windows 10 touch screen devices.

Our second finalist, Chesney Gallagher, showed off many new enhancements to SOLIDWORKS Assemblies that will make users much more productive… in his true Manchester style.

Assembly Visualization of SOLIDWORKS performance information

Use ALT key to hide surfaces during mate

William Roberts (aka Billy Bob), had no problem with the big stage delivering a resonating performance on 3D Interconnect enhancements that make it even easier to use non-native and neutral data formats in SOLIDWORKS.

3D Interconnect now supports STEP, IGES, ACIS.

3D Interconnect supports updating neutral files.

3D Interconnect now preserves curves and sketches.

3D Interconnect now reads custom properties.

Finally, Tad Slater introduced Fabrication Delighters, Tab and Slot self fixturing design and SOLIDWORKS PDM enhancements.

New Tab and Slot feature works in parts, multi-body parts and assemblies.

SOLIDWORKS PDM bi-directional communication with drawing revision table

We added a few wrinkles into the 2017 skit, adding a user into a character role and having live audience and live stream attendee participation. Once the votes were counted, we narrowed the field down to our two finalist.

Our first finalist, Lord Percy, delivered a highly compelling presentation of all the new capabilities in SOLIDWORKS to handle large assembly design.

Can now set multiple objects to resolved in Large Design Review

Ability to turn off graphics (scenery) data

Revert all data back to graphics to increase performance.

Ability to insert and mate graphics components

Our second finalist, Billy Bob, took the stage and amazed the audience presenting Generative Design for SOLIDWORKS.

Complete SOLIDWORKS Integration with SIMULATION View

As the voting came to completion live on stage, it was a tie between Lord Percy (Large Assembly Performance) and Billy Bob (Generative Design). Shortly after, final results showed Lord Percy became the SOLIDWORKS Next Top Modeler with 52 percent of the vote.

As a reminder, everything shown at SOLIDWORKS WORLD and in this blog is a TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW and new functionality is always changing until fully vetted and not guaranteed to be in the next release.