Selection
If you have had the opportunity to attend a class with us here at Javelin, I am certain you have heard all of our instructors speak about the abilities that the selection tools within SOLIDWORKS have to accelerate your workflow. Well get ready to have those selections accelerate your workflow even further as SOLIDWORKS has put a Selection Context Menu right at the tip of your cursor in SOLIDWORKS 2015 – Literally!
My absolute favorite enhancement for SOLIDWORKS 2015 is the ability to save repeatably selectable SELECTION SETS from the feature manager! It is often in our designs that we need to re-select the same sets of faces, edges or components more than a few times while completing a design. As you can see in the following video, the re-selection process is now instant, giving us more time to focus on our designs.
Many of the tools we find in SolidWorks are often overlooked by most designers in favor of “going with what they know”. Most of the time this leads down the road of outdated tools and practices while modeling. One set of overlooked tools is the selection tool-set within SolidWorks. There are a number of gains that can be made with the ability to quickly select everything – deselect the items you actually want and then invert the selection entirely. Take a look at the following video and see where you too can save time while designing.
Imported Bodies Video Series – 2. Repairing an Imported Model (Manual Selection of Open Edges) [VIDEO]
In the first article of this series, I used different troubleshooting tools for finding the culprit that generated the imported body error, i.e. a planar face that was self-intersecting. Deleting the “bad” face created 99 gaps between 101 surface bodies which replaced the original imported solid body. In order to repair the model, I have to re-create the deleted face, which seems simple considering that it was planar (use the “planar surface” feature, right?), but it is complicated by the huge number of unconnected open edges that have to be selected as boundaries of the new planar face. What is the fastest way to manually select all these open edges? What about box selecting them? Watch this video for the whole procedure in order to see the problems I…
When applyIng a fillet feature to a lot of edges, the most time consuming part is selecting them. In SolidWorks 2012 and prior, selecting edges based on rules was available only when using the FilletXpert. Because of that, the user’s options were restricted to applying constant radius fillets only. Starting with SolidWorks 2013, this functionality has been extended to manual fillets, offering fast edge selection for constant and variable radius fillets. This video presents two different techniques for saving time while filleting. In more complex models, these workflows can potentially save minutes or even hours of what it is in the end a very boring and repetitive task.
Have you ever been working in SOLIDWORKS when suddenly you are no longer able to select items in the graphics area, your cursor now showing what looks like a small blue funnel next to it? If so you’ve accidentally turned on the SOLIDWORKS Selection Filter. The Selection Filter is intended to help you select specific types of items in the graphics area, such as faces, edges or vertices. However, when you accidentally turn them on, without knowing how, they can quickly turn from a useful tool to a source of frustration. Here’s how you can make selection filters work for you, and especially HOW TO TURN THEM OFF. The selection filters are controlled by the Selection Filter toolbar, however there are also several keyboard shortcuts that will toggle the selection filters on and off. This is often how users will accidentally activate a filter. The keyboard shortcuts are: F5 — Toggle the display…
Have you every had to fight your way through a model performing several CTRL+Select operations as you are attempting to apply an appearance to a few faces or a specific type of face in your model. It is a question we run into every so often on the support lines here at Javelin and the caller often states “There must be a better way to make these selections that having to select each and every individual face.” As it turns out we do have a tool that can help us make these selections quickly, along with a degree of refinement not available elsewhere in SolidWorks. Enter at Stage Right, Power Select! As it turns out it’s been with us the entire time (At least since SolidWorks 2004). With every other release of SolidWorks it seems Power Select gets an upgrade to its growing list of capabilities. Total integration of…