Graphics Systems SolidNotes

MOTION..........LIKE NEVER BEFORE !!

My previous article did give you some insights about importing motion loads in Simulation 2009. Time and again solidworks Simulation has proved that its trying to make our life easy every year with new enhancements. In 2010, it has now added the Simulation Setup inside motion. Once you are all set with your required mechanism in Motion, all you need to do is go to the Simulation Setup and it will guide you through the process. You can specify the mesh density, time steps and material property during the simulation setup process.

As we click on “Calculate” to compute for our motion study, we need to go with “Calculate Simulation Study” and then obtain Stress, Factor of Safety and Displacement plots. The cool feature is that as you would visualize any normal motion study, you can also view the  Simulation plots changing in real time. It again depends on the time step that you specify during the Simulation Setup within the Motion Study.

All the above mentioned was motion analysis with respect to time.  Solidworks Simulation team has also come up with “Event based Motion” as a part of Simulation Professional in 2010 version. This could be easily explained from the fact that one event triggers another event in a sequence. This type of motion analysis is very important when we are unaware of any time factors in the motion study.

Bypass Your Graphics Card

If you have display glitches or similar issues in SolidWorks that you suspect may be due to an old driver or unsupported graphics card, there is a pretty simple way to get some good confirmation. It's a setting inside of SolidWorks iteself called "Use Software OpenGL."

Where do you find it? Tools > Options > System > Performance. You will find a setting to turn on Software OpenGL -- it's a check box. Important: You can only set this option when you are in SolidWorks but you have no documents open. Since you're changing how the graphics are being dealt with, if you have documents open in SolidWorks you can't very well make the switch and hence the option checkbox will be grayed out.

Once you set this to "on", you are telling SolidWorks not to use the graphics card for OpenGL functions -- you're essentially bypassing the card. It's not as fast to work in this mode, but if you have an old graphics card, or one that isn't supported, it might be better to work this way. If you're using this setting as part of the troubleshooting process, you'll know that your problem is graphics card or driver related and can proceed accordingly.

BTW, in case you're wondering, we currently recommend the nVidia Quadro FX580 as our baseline graphics card for SolidWorks users.

EPDM 2010: Toolbox is in the Vault !

The Toolbox source data, including the database, is now all kept inside the EPDM vault. You can have a single source for your Toolbox data that can be replicated to multiple sites.

EPDM for 2010 automatically checks the source files out when an administrator makes changes. The Enterprise Toolbox Administrator gives you the option to set user permissions for when accessing the source files. It will also let you set the path of the source file root folder.

The Toolbox files are now cached locally automatically.  If a user tries to clear their cache that contains Toolbox components, a dialog appears asking if they would like to remove the Toolbox files.

EPDM for 2010 has another option to search sub folders under the Toolbox root folder. Now when new assemblies are migrated into the vault or assemblies that were referencing Toolbox files outside the vault Enterprise Search can find their references.

Finally, you are given the option in EPDM 2010 to either use the copied part or create configuration option.  In previous releases only the create configuration option was supported.

SolidWorks 2010 Movie Trailer Spoofs! Wayne's World, James Bond, Office Space, Terminator

If you attended our SolidWorks 2010 Midwest Premiere events this year, you were one of the over 400 lucky SolidWorks users to see our SolidWorks "movie trailers."   These spoofs, created by our very own marketing group, really added to the "movie" theme of our events and were very well received by the audience. I think my favorite one is the James Bond spoof on 3DVIA Composer. 

Check them out and comment on your favorite one!

SolidWorks 2010 Features - 3D CAD - Wayne's World Spoof

3DVIA Composer - Product Documentation - James Bond Spoof

Enterprise PDM - Product Data Management - Office Space Spoof

Simulation (FEA) - Product Analysis- Terminator 2 Spoof

How to create a password protected PDF for free

There are times when I want to email a document to a vendor or a customer a PDF but I want to make sure that, in the off chance that it falls into the wrong hands, it cannot be opened.  This functionality is normally reserved for Adobe Acrobat Professional.  However, I found that you can use an open source software to do the same thing.

The software is called PDF Creator.  I've been personally using this for years and it works well.  Simply install it and create the PDF print driver.  Then, you have the option to select the PDF options and are able to set passwords for anyone who wants to view or edit the document prior to creating the PDF.  It also helps you protect intellectual property by disallowing users from copying information from the PDF.  Below is a screenshot from their web page.

Enjoy and I hope that we'll have a warm winter!

When Good Routes Go Bad

A customer from the oil and gas industry recently asked me for some assistance with a SolidWorks piping (Routing) assembly.  It is not uncommon in his industry to connect flanges directly to tees but that's not as straight-forward as one might like.  So I've made a brief video to help him and you understand the techniques behind routing flanges to tees.  Enjoy!  And please comment.

EPDM Local View Desktop Shortcut

I use a desktop Shortcut for my Enterprise demos and I thought it would be beneficial to share.

First you need to find out where your local view of the file vault is located. For this example my local view is called EnterprisePDM and it’s kept under the root directory C: on my workstation.

Right-click your desktop and select New then Shortcut.
 

You need to start the location for this Shortcut with %windir%\explorer.exe /e, /select, then inside quotes enter the directory of your local view with any location to a particular project folder from inside your vault.  

Select Next, type a name for the Shortcut and click Finish.

The screen shot below shows a Shortcut using the following location: %windir%\explorer.exe /e, /select, "C:\EnterprisePDM\Engineering\Project #2009\Design Data"

What you end up with is a “clever” shortcut. It sends you to a nicely formatted window with all your folder lists. It also takes you directly to the folder you specified in your Shortcut.

SolidWorks 2010 Midwest Premiere

Note: This article was written for me by our own Dave Pond, who is coordinating our rollouts. Dave does a great job in making these really fun events and assures me there will be some suprises you won't want to miss. Personally, I'm excited to be showing 2010 on the largest screens EVER and hope you don't get motion sickness :)

You're invited to experience SolidWorks 2010 at one of our four 30 x 50 ft. movie screens at Marcus theaters across the Midwest!

SolidWorks 2010 is the culmination of 14 years of implementing enhancements based on customer requests from the million-strong SolidWorks community. As a result, SolidWorks 2010 is dedicated to optimizing the core design functions you stake your career on every day.

A more intuitive user-interface significantly reduces mouse travel and increases design efficiency. SolidWorks 2010 further improves user productivity by automatically detecting and resolving modeling challenges that would typically be frustrating for new users.

In October, we will be hosting a series of events that will showcase the new features of SolidWorks 2010.  We invite you to join us at the location nearest you.  To sign up, please click on the register button below.

Register for the SolidWorks 2010 Premiere and we'll show you the following highlights of the best release of SolidWorks!

• SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress
• Rapid Dimension for Drawing Detailing
• Improved Mirror Components in Assembly
• Multibody Support for Sheet-Metal Parts
• Mouse Gesture Heads-Up User Interface
• Sheet-Metal Export to DXF/DWG Enhancements
• Configuration Publisher
• And Much More!

^{Tues., Oct. 6th - Milwaukee (Brookfield), WI
Thurs., Oct. 8th - Chicago (Addison), IL
Tues., Oct. 13th - Madison, WI
Thurs., Oct. 15th - Green Bay, WI}

WHERE IS MY PART ? …………….I NEED MOTION LOADS

As the title describes, you may have often come across a situation where you need to import the motion loads on any one of the component/part and the moment you click on simulation-Import motion loads, you do not see any part mentioned in the “Available Assembly Components”.  This might lead you to think whether – did the motion study go through? or is it a bug in the software ? Well the answer is simple. In Simulation, you have to make sure that the components of interest has to be a single part i.e. child of the main assembly rather than being a part of a sub assembly. Any part  belonging to a subassembly will not show up in the available components list. In Simulation motion, where you have to often deal with mates, redundancies and so on, it is always better to think about the parts of interest in the beginning cause this might lead you to spend long hours in re-creating the mates while trying to dissolve the subassembly.

 

There is another work around for the above problem. This can be done by using the command “Dissolve sub assembly”. All you need to do is right click on the sub-assembly and select “Dissolve sub assembly”. This will help you to break the parts under the sub-assembly and make them the children of the main assembly. Again, as mentioned earlier, care has to be taken before proceeding with the motion study as this might leave you with all of errors in mates.

I hope, this will give you a heads up on how to proceed with a motion study and save you some time and focus more on simulation (motion and FEA) rather than re-creating the assembly mates.

Verification on Rebuild

My last few blogs discussed the two rebuild command in SolidWorks: standard rebuild (the "green light" icon) versus forced rebuild (CTRL-Q). Regardless of which command is used, it is important to understand what is happening when SolidWorks is building a feature.

 

When a feature is being built, the modeling engine is carrying out an instruction in the file's instruction set. The resulting information is geometry in the design space. SolidWorks will check this geometry against existing geometry in the model to make sure it "fits" geometrically.

 

By default, SolidWorks checks the geometry it is building against the adjacent faces, that is, the faces that share an edge with the face(s) of the feature it is building. If you are building a fillet, for example, SolidWorks checks to see if the face of the fillet fits with the faces the fillet shares edges with ("connects to"). If it fits, SolidWorks moves on. If not, an error is generated.

 

While this level of geometry checking is generally efficient, in some cases it is not sufficient. There can be cases where the face being built intersects with faces already in the model, but there is no intentional connection; they aren't supposed to share edges. While this will certainly be a problem, the default level of checking doesn't catch this because it only checks against faces it is supposed to connect with.

 

For this reason, SolidWorks has another level of checking. Tools, Options, System Options, Performance has a switch called Verification on Rebuild/Enable Advanced Geometry Checking. When this is active, SolidWorks checks the face it is building against all existing faces in the model. This will ensure nothing sneaks past, but it does come at the cost of performance, especially in large and complex models with many faces.

 

In the end, what I recommend is this: as part of your release procedure, activate the Verification on Rebuild option and hit CTRL-Q. Do this on every part you make, every assembly, and every drawing and you will ensure the highest quality model and drawing geometry possible.