SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer Workflow [VIDEO]

SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer (SWID) is an amazing tool for designers to easily create objects of complex geometry. A typical workflow for industrial designers is to brainstorm some concept sketches in 2D, then move into 3D surface rendering and finally the finished 3D CAD design.

Traditionally these three steps are linear, meaning the first stage must be completed for the second to begin, as shown in the diagram below:

Typical workflow for industrial designing

SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer eliminates the linearity and allows your team to work within one software to complete your project from sketch to a finished 3D CAD design eliminating the time lost between each traditional step.

Sketching

With help of the Wacom Tablet sketching in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer is as intuitive and simple as ever. With 3D sketches allowing you to easily sketch on every plane you can quickly have the general shape of your object prepared in minutes.

Sketching on planes and freeform objects

Not only is there 3D sketching but you can also sketch directly on your freeform object. By sketching some contours on the object above the designer is able to easily manipulate his freeform object to match.

Freeform modeling

By pushing and pulling the mesh points you can easily manipulate your freeform object to align to the shape of the sketches drawn in the previous step. To speed up the design of your project you can even apply freeform symmetry. Every time you update one side of the object the other will automatically update.

Adding the toast slots with parametric modeling

The advantage that the SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer Workflow provides is the ability to use both freeform manipulation and parametric features within one software. There is very limited exporting and importing if any when using Industrial Designer. This speeds up the design workflow by eliminating downtime.

Two toaster designs

Get a free trial

SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer is a very powerful tool to efficiently take your design from concept sketch to finished CAD model. To learn more and receive a free 2 week trial please contact us.