Expand Your Toolset and Reduce Time to Market – Discover Design in the Cloud

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SOLIDWORKS is a great design solution and has won me over since I first laid eyes on it. In fact, it’s the reason I studied mechanical engineering in college and became an engineer. I was introduced to SOLIDWORKS at a young age, and quickly discovered my passion for design and engineering.

What if you could make SOLIDWORKS better? You can by extending your data to the cloud and leveraging cloud-connected solutions.

These days I work on mainly designing and building our browser-based roles, such as Manufacturing Definition Creator and 3D Creator and I see first-hand how they complement SOLIDWORKS and how they can improve your toolset and your skillset. You know the saying “knowledge is power.” I believe the more solutions you have under your belt the more power you have.

In this blog I want to discuss some of the 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions but ultimately, I want to discuss what that means for existing SOLIDWORKS users and how people like yourselves can access and benefit from these solutions.

3D Creator, for example, is a powerful browser-based role for parametric part and assembly design.

This is a great role for SOLIDWORKS users who want to design on the fly or those who need quick, flexible access to CAD. The beauty of it is you can fire up 3D Creator on any device, from any web browser and easily design alongside your SOLIDWORKS data that has been uploaded to the platform.

The browser based design solutionhasa lot of unique aspects  that help set it apart from traditional installed CAD applications.. One unique benefit is of course that it runs fully on the cloud, meaning no hardware installations and automatic updates at every release.

With cloud computing these solutions also have the advantage ofleveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to make your daily tasks easier and faster by providing design guidance and speeding up repetitive tasks. For instance, the AI-powered Smart Mate feature in 3D Creator helps you create mates using automatic face identification while using intuitive drag, drop, and snap workflows. No command activation needed, it’s all at your fingertips for a streamlined assembly process.

3D Creator is also very easy to learn and navigate through. It features the Welcome App that offers tutorials to help new and existing users get started quickly and bring them up to speed on the various features and apps of roles they own. In addition, you can launch other roles straight from the app. You can also access support and user forums within the app.

To sweeten the pot, you can use the Switch App options in the standard tool bar or by using the shortcut command to switch between roles to access other browser based tools. Best part is your model stays exactly where you left it on screen and you never lose track of what you’re working on.

And lastly, my favorite part is the single modeling environment. How many times as a designer, have you created an assembly to only realize the structure makes more sense as a sub-assembly? With the single modeling environment, any feature can be turned into a component, any part into an assembly, and vice versa. The entire solution is designed to eliminate the need for upfront assembly planning and removes the need to choose whether something is a part, sub-assembly, or top- level assembly. It’s the type of flexibility I never knew I needed until I used it and now I can never go back to traditional part and assembly workflows.

In addition, all of the data management is built in out of the box, and the data is stored alongside your SOLIDWORKS data on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform if you’re using any of the cloud-connected versions such as Collaborative Designer for SOLIDWORKS or use 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS.

Stay productive with the ability to work with all solutions interchangeably without data translation and the ability to easily switch between roles right from within your interface.

You may be thinking “SOLIDWORKS can do all the above.” But not from a web-browser. With these roles, my design travel with me anywhere I go and I am never confined to a single desktop. And one thing it can’t do is subdivision (Sub-D) modeling. But you’re in luck as we offer 3D Sculptor for that for all your freeform modeling needs.

 

 

 

 

When you’re ready to dust off and update that old desktop we offer the browser-based roles individually or we’ve got a rocking deal in the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Offer that includes many roles. The browser based roles not only extend your SOLIDWORKS capabilities, and increase your flexibility but being on the cloud also means you always have access to the latest and greatest features automatically at every release, which we do quarterly each year. So there are no manual updates or time consuming, expensive data migrations.

From one long time SOLIDWORKS user to another, The SOLIDWORKS Cloud Offer is the way to go as it provides a complete suite of solutions for design and engineering and enables flexibility that I never dreamed ofThe core roles of this offer are 3D Creator and 3D Sculptor, but you also get built in data management, collaboration, MBD, drawings, structures, sheet metal, rendering, and more.

Are you ready to take on the next generation of CAD? Contact your VAR for a demo of any of the 3DEXPERIENCE Works roles or visit https://www.solidworks.com/3dexperience-works.

Lean more about the AI-powered Design Assistant feature in the browser-based roles in this blog  and the Welcome app in this blog.

 

 

Chris Pagliarini

Chris Pagliarini

Chris Pagliarini is a Product Portfolio Manager for SOLIDWORKS. Chris has been a dedicated SOLIDWORKS user for 8+ years with exposure in several areas from research, sheet metal design, Equipment packaging & enclosures, Model-based design, and aerospace & defense design. During his free time he enjoys exploring new technology, golfing, skiing, and fishing.