SOLIDWORKS In-context
Remember playing hide and seek with your friends? I played that game with my friends for hours until our moms yelled out the door to get our behinds in the house for bed time. Playing hide and seek with your SOLIDWORKS assembly parts while editing…
SOLIDWORKS In-context relations and editing is a powerful tool. Driving features from one component allows features in other components to update automatically. Yet with great power comes great responsibility (apologies for the movie reference). In some cases you may accidentally add an external reference that…
Alin’s SW2013 Pick of the Day: Envelopes Simplify In-Context Design
Building new parts directly in the context of an assembly is a very powerful technique that has been available in SolidWorks for a long time. Watching such components update in sync as the user intended, just by modifying a few dimensions in the assembly, is magical. A properly built top-down assembly is a thing of beauty. That being said, most users are apprehensive when doing in-context design, just because such a top-down assembly can be a minefield, waiting for the wrong step of an inexperienced user. One of these very dangerous mines is the InPlace mate, which is used for locating parts created in the context of an assembly. The InPlace mate is a very useful tool but a very dangerous one. Some people believe that in…
When creating a new part in context of an assembly the orientation is determined by the position of selected face relative to the front plane of the assembly. <img class=”wp-image-3196 alignnone” title=”face of new part” src=”http://www.javelin-tech.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/face-of-new-part.png” alt=”” width=”334″ height=”395″ /> <!–more–> This may result…