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How to Export from SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer to SOLIDWORKS
I recently experienced SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer (SWID) at SOLIDWORKS World 2016 and needless to say I was excited. When I returned to the Javelin office afterwards, I knew I had to get my hands on this product. Sure enough, I did and as exciting as…
SolidWorks Tutorial – Import Diagnostics (3) – Troubleshooting and Healing [VIDEO]
This is the third in a series of articles focused on troubleshooting and healing topological errors from geometry imported in SolidWorks. As we discovered in the second article of this series, the Import Diagnostics is a good tool for troubleshooting topological errors. It can also be used for fixing…
SolidWorks Tutorial: Import Diagnostics (1) – “Face Piercing Through Solid” Error [VIDEO]
This week, we will post a series of articles focused on troubleshooting and healing topological errors from geometry imported in SolidWorks. Two designers of different nationalities can communicate using a lingua franca, a language that is not native to either of them, but which is known…
Using SOLIDWORKS Direct Modeling to modify an imported model without feature history [VIDEO]
How can you modify a model without history? Use the SOLIDWORKS direct modeling tools to reverse engineer an existing model. When you need to create tooling or fixtures for your customer parts, it is often necessary to remove all the details that will not be produced by your tooling, or…
Some people will be shocked by the title of this article. How can you say that SolidWorks can do direct modeling when every operation you perform on the model is documented in the feature tree? Let me start by saying that if the definition of direct modeling includes loosing track of the operations you perform on the affected geometry, then SolidWorks does not have direct modeling capabilities. But if you need to modify existing solid bodies, regardless of how they were created, then I can tell you that SolidWorks has the capabilities that you are looking for! This video present a very good example on how you can perform a complex change affecting a local area of an imported body using SolidWorks. The update is…
Imported Bodies Video Series – 3. Repairing an Imported Model (Automatic Selection of Open Edges Using a Macro) [VIDEO]
In the first episode of this series I deleted a faulty face from an imported model, only to re-create it using the planar surface feature in the second episode. I hope you remember how cumbersome it was to select all those unconnected open loops in order to define the boundary of the new planar surface. Fortunately, any repetitive manual work could easily be performed by macros (the equivalent of industrial robots in SolidWorks). It actually took less than 5 minutes for my colleague Adam Bridgman, who is teaching the SolidWorks Visual Basic and the SolidWorks API courses here at Javelin, to write a macro for selecting all the open edges from a part. As you will see in the third video of this series, re-creating a planar surface with a…
There are lots of reasons why models imported in SolidWorks from IGES, STEP or Parasolid files have topological errors. The simplest analogy I can make is that the various CAD products used for creating geometry speak different languages and, in order to understand each other, they need translators. These translators are the neutral formats mentioned before. That being said, whenever you get a middleman in the communication chain, bits of information could be lost and as a result you get topological errors like: gaps in the body self intersecting faces faces with more than one closed contour faces that are piercing the solid body Once the errors are identified they need to be repaired before using the model for anything else. In this series of articles,…