Focus on your Designs – a few quick tips
SolidWorks 2007 has gone a long way to allow you to focus on designing not on CAD rules One way is by dealing with two of the most commonly performed operations in MCAD: viewing and selection.
Model Interaction
Let’s start with viewing and what we did with 2007 to help eliminate excessive viewing operations. After using 2007 for a while, you’ll notice that you more successful at getting around in your SolidWorks Window when working on your part or assembly. This is due in part, to a change that was made to zoom and rotate. You’ll notice that when you now zoom in 2007, the area of interest that is zoomed to is always centered on the placement of your cursor. This makes it extremely easy to zoom in on detail without having to pan or re-center your view. You’ll also notice that this same principle applies to rotating your view. In 2007, view rotation occurs around the placement of where your cursor is, not the center of the screen. This makes it easy to rotate around areas of interest, especially when zoomed in on a small portion of the overall model or assembly.
Isolate
Once you are zoomed into your area of interest, chances are if you are viewing a complex assembly, some component or components will obstruct your view or make it confusing with modeling in context of the assembly. The Isolate command is very useful in situations like these. Simply right mouse button on the component (or shift select multiple components) in the Feature Manager or SolidWorks Window, can select Isolate.
What this will do for you is to “isolate” that component/s and hide everything else completely or with transparency or with wireframe. You can even save this isolated view for later use as a display state. This gives the user a quick and easy way to focus on the task at hand, without visual clutter getting in the way.
Selection Manager
Now that we have you moving around efficiently when viewing your SolidWorks view, let’s talk about the other most commonly performed operation: selection. For 2007, we have introduced the SelectionManager.
The SelectionManager consolidates 2006 functions formally known as Smart Select and Contour Select under one versatile selection mechanism. Although currently for 2007, we have not “rolled out” SelectionManager to all functions that can use it, it is best exemplified when using it in Sweep, Loft and Boundary features. Previous to Selection Manager, SolidWorks users often first build sketch features with predetermined lengths and combinations of geometry to represent profiles, guide curves, paths and curves. With SelectionManager this is no longer necessary. SelectionManager allows you to select and modify single or multiple sketch elements and/or model edges and change their length “on-the-fly” thereby eliminating pre-built features and reducing the amount of “over-head” needed to create surfaces and solid features.
These enhancements to SolidWorks are just a few of the ways that we are committed to getting CAD out of the way so that you can do what your really want to do and that is to design better products.
Fielder