Graphics Systems SolidNotes

Back to School and a New SolidWorks Option in 2012

One of the most enjoyable aspects of a new SolidWorks release, for me, is seeing old faces come in for new training. Whether it’s a one-day update class or a refresher on assembly modeling or even Essentials, I always look forward to the new release because I know I’m going to see people I’ve trained in the past come back around for more.

Something that strikes me is the people I see come in for updates every year are the ones that seem to be some of the best users; they are also the happiest users. They see SolidWorks as a tool and they want to make sure they are getting everything out of it. Sure, they could just do things the same old way they learned years ago, but instead of resting on their laurels, they come back and push themselves so they can in turn push the tool to work better for them.

If you come to an update class, one of the many new things you’ll learn is a new behavior in SolidWorks 2012 that rotates your model view normal to your sketch plane automatically when you create a new sketch; essentially the behavior you see when you make your first sketch in a SolidWorks part continues for your second, third, fourth, etc. If you want to turn this on (or back off), you’ll find the setting in Tools, Options, Systems Options on the Sketch page right at the top as shown:

 

 

Check our training calendar and see if you can’t improve your skills by coming back to school for a day or two. We have a lot of classes on the schedule for the first quarter of 2012 and I’m pleased to see how fast they are filling already.

As for me, I’ll be going back to school as well by attending SolidWorks World in February. I can’t wait to learn some new things from other users and instructors and bring them back with me to share with my students throughout the coming year.

Having Trouble Finding a Tool in Solidworks?

Today's tip is searching for a tool that you can't find. Whether you're a new user who isn't too familiar with the software or someone who has been using SolidWorks for years, but just can't remember where a specific tool or command lives.

To use this technique, navigate to the search bar and using search commands, click on the commands and look for, for example, line. When you go to the line command, you can either open it right away or click on the magnifying glass over to the right, you'll get a red arrow showing where the line tool is.

The other tip within the search command would be to hit the "W" key. It goes into the commands area, from there, type in the command you're looking for, and open. It will open directly and you can immediately begin working.

Optical Illusion - Or Not? A SolidWorks Modeling Challenge

As designers, we are always encouraged to see things from a different angle. To think outside the box, as it were, to use both sides of our brain. Visualize a solution to a problem and then plot the steps toward its solution. But whether you are naturally left- or right-brained – hey, we all need a break once in a while!

So, I thought I’d start off the New Year with a light-hearted challenge: Can you model this in SolidWorks?

Is it just an optical illusion? A creative use of Planes during model creation? Some Photoshop trickery? All of the above? Use the Comment fields below to give us your ideas . Hints (besides the one already included), if not the final answer, will be given in an upcoming post.

For this and other CAD news, remember to follow us on Twitter!

Tips for using Depth of Field in 3DVIA Composer 2012

One of the new features in 3DVIA Composer 2012 is the ability to set a depth of field for a view. This is very useful to call attention to a specific area of a model in a very natural way. It also lets you add an artistic touch to a marketing image, giving it a photographic look.

The first thing you need to know is that Depth of Field only works when you have Perspective turned on in your View. The reason is simple -- without a vanishing point, there is no way to calculate how the Depth of Field is to appear in the View. So, make sure you have Perspective turned on before you play with the Depth of Field tools; without it, nothing will appear to happen. Perspective is a toggle on the far lower-right of the 3DVIA Composer application window:

Where do you find the Depth of Field tools? Look at the Render menu, and you'll see some icons related to Depth of Field all in one place:

Depth of Field is the largest button, and it's a toggle. In order for it to be effective, however, you need to Set Focal Point. This is much like single-spot autofocus on an SLR camera: you pick one spot in 3D space and that is what will remain in sharp focus. In 3DVIA Composer, you are clicking on a face of a geometry actor. The tool is fairly intuitive, and it will automatically know the Z-depth from your camera view based on what and where you click.

You will notice that setting the focal point will make a visible mark in your active View -- that's so you can see exactly where the focal point is in your scene. To hide the focal point graphic (but keep the setting) put an X in the Visible checkbox in the Depth of Field section of the Render toolbar. You can toggle it back on later if you want to see it again.

While there is an Automatic setting for Depth of Field, I never use it. If you're going to turn on Depth of Field, you are going to want to control what's in focus. Automatic will have the system move the focal point as you rotate and move the model -- I've not seen it be really helpful in my testing of the setting.

So let's take a look at how this works. This is the model and View I'm working with:

The first thing I want to do is turn on Perspective. Depth of Field notwithstanding, this one, simple setting adds realism to the View simply because in real life there is always a vanishing point. Views without perspective look artificial, which in mechanical drawing is "normal" but you'll never see a camera take an image of something without perspective (nor will your direct vision ever give you such a view).

Now that looks much more natural. I want to highlight the logo on the filter cap -- I'm selling OUR supercharger, not just anyone's. So let's turn on Depth of Field and click the closest corner of the G as the focal point. Here's the result:

This nicely calls attention to our brand in the image; if I were doing a product shot with my DSLR, I'd do something similar.

You can play with the settings for the Depth of Field in the Viewport Settings. There you will find another toggle for Depth of Field being turned on or off, as well as two sliders for Level (how deep the in-focus area is) and Number of Passes (how many times the Depth of Field is rendered, where more levels equals better image quality at the expense of time). These are the settings I've used for the View that I'm working with in our example:

In real life there would be some more definition with shadows and lighting to make the image pop a bit. I could go into the different lighting and shadow settings, but that's another post. Besides, I just need to refine the image a little bit. That's why I love Ambient Occlusion -- it's a one-click image enhancer:

That's more like it! Sure, there are other settings we can play with, but I get a lot of mileage out of simply turning on Perspective, setting a Depth of Field and turning on Ambient Occlusion with the default settings. Now that you know these tools and techniques, I don't want to see any more flat isometric renderings for marketing product shots!

 

SolidWorks Performance Test: Share The Love

In SolidWorks 2011, a new tool called SolidWorks Performance Test was introduced. This is a wonderful thing! For years, people have asked me advice on buying new computers and upgrading existing computer systems for SolidWorks. There was (and still is) a lot of confusion over what affects SolidWorks performance. Now, we all have one standard benchmark with which to compare systems.

Understand that the Performance Test is a mainstream test. It's not going to show how systems may perform in extreme cases (huge assemblies or extrordinarily complex part models). But it is a good basis for comparison on how systems will perform for the typical SolidWorks user.

The most useful part of the Performance Test is the ability to easily share your results with the rest of the world. The Share Your Score webpage that SolidWorks Corporation hosts is excellent because it's searchable. Want to know how well a certain graphics card works, or the difference between a few choices? Just hit the Share You Score webpage and find out for yourself. Since the test is available on different versions of SolidWorks (2011 or 2012 at this point) it can also show differences on how older hardware will work on newer versions of SolidWorks.

Check out the pages I've linked to earlier in this article, and when you get a chance, please run the SolidWorks Performance Test on your system and share your results. The more people who do, the better the resource will be for all of us. By the way, here's the score for my Dell M6500:

Wisconsin-Illinois SolidWorks Simulation User's Group

My faithful readers:

Next week, Thursday (15, December 2011) will be the WI-IL Simulation User's Group meeting.  Registration begins at 9AM.  For more infomation please visit the group's site on SWUGN. I'll be covering What's New in 2012 Simulation (FEA, motion, and CFD)

http://www.swugn.org/swugn/calendar/ugdetails.htm?id=215

 

See you next week!

Copying and Deriving Sketches

Sol and Sal are swapping some of their favorite SolidWorks tips and tricks:

Sol: “Of course…I know that! If I need to reuse sketch geometry, I can just copy geometry while I’m editing a sketch (Ctrl-C or Edit->Copy), and paste it into another sketch that I’m editing (Ctrl-V or Edit->Paste). Duh! I mean it’s a Windows program…right?”

Sal: “Hey, Sol, I can save you some time! If you wanted to reuse an entire sketch, you don’t even need to be in an editing environment. You can simply select your sketch in the Feature Manager, invoke the Copy function, select the face or plane on which you want the copy, and then select Paste. Viola! I just saved you at least four steps!”

It was about this time that Sam walked in.

“Hey, guys, you’re doing that the hard way!” Sol and Sal watched as Sam held down the Ctrl key and then just dragged sketches from the Feature Manager to any face or plane in the model. “How many more steps did that just save?”

Sol: Blink.

Sal: Gulp.

“But,” Sam continued, “have you ever needed these copied sketches to update whenever the original changes?”

“Yes,” Sol offered, “that would be especially useful for some of the Loft and Sweep features I use,” and Sal added “wouldn’t you just methodically link all the dimension values together as you created them?”

“Watch me,” Sam said, as he held down the Ctrl key and selected both his sketch and a new sketch plane, then slid up to the Insert menu pull-down and chose “Derived Sketch.” Right below “Sketch1” in the Feature Manager Sol and Sal saw that there was now a “Sketch2 derived” object…that updated with every change that Sam made to the original!

“Nice!” exclaimed Sol, but Sal had a good question: “Okay, but what if I ever need to break that relationship at some point?”

“See Figure 1,” Sam said, looking down the screen just a bit.

 

Fig. 1 – Right-click on a Derived Sketch to “Underive” it.

“Wow, thanks again for another great tip!” Sol said. Sal chimed in: “Where do you learn all these cool things about SolidWorks?”

“SolidNotes, my friend. SolidNotes.”

 

Reference Dimension Preference

After using SolidWorks for a few years, you might find some of the default behaviors that are geared toward newer users a bit… annoying. One of those behaviors for me is this: when I place a dimension that would overdefine a sketch, SolidWorks prompts me and asks if I want to make the dimension driven instead of driving. So far, so, good, but I usually am placing the dimension with the intention of making it driven. Knowing that, I’d prefer the default to that prompt to be “Make it Driven” instead of “Leave it Driving.”

Luckily, there’s a setting that I can enable to make it work the way I’d like. Go to Tools, Options, and click the System Options tab. Click on the Sketch page and then enable “Set driven by default” under “Over defining dimensions.” Now you the system will assume you made the dimension with the intent of making it driving, not the other way around!

 

 

 

Default Prompt

 

 

My Preference

Graphics Systems User Conference Wrap-Up

This blog is a couple of days late, but there’s a good reason! Last week, Graphics Systems held its annual User Conference and I was there. I did a lot of presenting, a lot of talking, too much eating, and not enough sleeping, but while it was a lot of work, it was worth it. It’s always great to see so many faces from the recent and not-so-recent past and catch up with old friends. Thank you to everyone who came to the conference, and from me personally, thanks to the hundreds of folks who attended my sessions.

On that note, for those who attended my sessions where I promised a handout (Tables, Drawing Templates, and Library Features specifically), those are coming! Watch your inbox over the next couple of days for an email from us that will give you access to those handouts and more goodies from other presentations and the conference in general!

One of the highlights of the show for me was the rematch of the “Tips and Tricks: Duel!” I did with Dale Rice, a fine gentleman from our Oakbrook Terrace, IL office. After losing a hard-fought battle with him I am now 1-1 and thinking of going into retirement; we’ll see what the future holds. For those who couldn’t be there, Dale and I went back and forth in a battle of our favorite SolidWorks tips and tricks; between last year and this year, we presented over 120! To end my column for this month, here is one of those tips, in case you missed it:

 

Select any face on a model. On the pop-up toolbar, select the Normal To icon to change your view normal to the selected face. Here’s the bonus: click it again to reverse! This works any time you see the Normal To icon, by the way, not just in the pop-up on a selected face.

 

Command Search: What's Old Is New

Remember in ancient times, when you used a DOS prompt? Perhaps your command environment of choice was -sh on a Unix system, or maybe you rocked the $ prompt in VAX/VMS. In any case, you probably made good use of command search paths and aliases. In those days, you had command-line interaction and nothing else -- some people even liked it.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, where icon-driven interfaces are clicked with a mouse or touched with a finger. Even in this environment, the ability to type in a command is desirable: the more icons you have, the more desirable it is.

Thus, we find command search (or actually, pervasive search that includes commands) implemented in Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android. It's very convenient to go to the Start Menu in Windows and type "Printers" to get directly to that area of the Control Panel.  For example, I find the reason most people don't use it is because they don't know about it. The only more convenient thing would be for my device to carry out commands by voice (which is already there on some platforms, in varying modes of reliability).

So it comes to pass that SolidWorks has command search in the latest incarnation -- SolidWorks 2012. You can click on it in the regular search window (it's the one with the >_ icon) or, more conveniently, it's automatically activated and given keyboard focus every time you hit the S key (you DO use the S key for your custom shortcut menu, don't you?)

You can type in part of a command (try "hole" if you're in a part) and you'll get a number of matches. Hit "Enter" and the top match will execute, or click on another item in the list to do that command instead (arrow keys work in the list too). If you want to drag it into the Command Manager, you just rip it right out of the list. Or use the eyeglasses icon to the right of the command in the list to see where it is in your existing interface.

If you want, you can make your own "shortcuts" to commands you use often. Think of these as nicknames. I've nicknamed "Hole Alignment" as "ha" so if I type in "ha" it comes to the top of the list; an Enter key later and I'm using the command I want. You can make these in the Customize interface (there is a new column called "Search Shortcut").

Once you try Command Search, I think you'll really like it. And if you haven't tried it in Windows or on your Mac or your smartphone, give that a shot too. Before too long, I believe you'll be speaking commands to your computer but in the meantime, What's Old Is New.