Welcome to this new edition of the SOLIDWORKS Support Monthly News, coauthored by members of the SOLIDWORKS Technical Support teams worldwide.
SOLIDWORKS 2015 Beta – looking back 10 years ago
We’re still all anxiously waiting for the beginning of this year’s Beta program (around the end of June) to discover and test all the new features in version 2015. Note that you can already sign up to be able to test all the SOLIDWORKS 2015 products participating in the Beta Program.
Meanwhile, let’s continue our journey and look back again at what made the news ten years ago in the What’s New pages of the documentation! After version 2004 (last month), here are excerpts from version 2005:
SOLIDWORKS
- Icons on toolbar buttons and in the FeatureManager design tree now follow the Windows XP style:
- Cross select: when you box select from left to right, only items completely within the box are selected. Now you can cross select from right to left to select items crossing the box boundaries in addition yo items within the box.
- Copy Settings wizard to distribute settings to other computers or save and restore them.
- Splines
- Many features moving from dialog boxes to PropertyManagers (Trim, Miror, Explode, etc.)
- Extrusion starting away from the sketch plane (from a surface, face, plane, vertex or offset)
- Assigned Mass Properties
- New SOLIDWORKS DWGEditor
- SOLIDWORKs animator now uses the Timeline interface
COSMOSWorks (the original name of SOLIDWORKS Simulation)
- Studies are now associated with a configuration – So you now get an independent Mesh for Each Study. In earlier releases, studies shared one mesh represented by the Mesh icon in the tree
- New study types: Nonlinear, Drop-Test, Fatigue
- Multiprocessor Support for FFEPlus Solver
Spotlight on features — Sheet metal– Understanding the option: “Create multiple flat patterns whenever a feature creates multiple shm bodies”
Under Tool, Options, Document Properties, Sheet Metal, there is the option Create multiple flat patterns whenever a feature creates multiple shm bodies. This is one of those options that is a bit misunderstood. So lets clarify when it is supposed to work.
| This option was implemented for those who work with multibody sheet metal and create certain specific operations. The user creates a sheet metal body with SOLIDWORKS 2011 or 2012, the feature tree will display one flat pattern feature |  |
| The user cuts the single body in half, producing 2 bodies. Notice the feature tree still displays 1 flat pattern feature. |  |
| The user checks this option. Now the feature tree displays 2 flat pattern features. |  |
The other circumstance where this option works is when doing a body pattern. The user has the ability to display a single flat pattern (default) or multiple flat patterns.
Be aware that this option will work only with parts created with SOLIDWORKS 2011 or 2012. Parts created after SOLIDWORKS 2012 will automatically display multiple flat pattern features.
Service Pack News
Service Pack 4.0 of version 2014 is planned for release this later month, with the Evaluation Version only a few days away.
Noteworthy Solutions from the SOLIDWORKS Knowledge Base
The assembly file is empty. When opening it in large design review mode, I can see the components but after resolving, it has lost all the parts and mates. How is that possible?
This result can be due to a user action rather than a software issue.
In SolidWorks 2012 and previous releases, when selecting one or more components within a subassemblies and pressing delete, the result was that the subassembly was deleted from the top assembly.
Refer to the image below.
Saving the top assembly did not produce any change on the subassembly file itself.
From SolidWorks 2013, when selecting one or more components within a subassemblies and pressing delete, the result is that the components are deleted from the subassembly.
Refer to the image below.
Saving the top assembly, the subassembly is also saved without the deleted parts.
See the final result below.
Please be aware of this changed behaviour to avoid unexpected results.
From Solution ID: S-066007
Is there a hotfix available for SPR 781081 (crash in SOLIDWORKS 2014 SP3 when changing units in the SOLIDWORKS Simulation Force dialog)?
Yes, the SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2014 SP3 hotfix for this SPR is provided in the form of a single .exe file in the Attachments section of this Solution. This hotfix will address the issue mentioned in SPR 781081.
Please refer to Solution ID: S-066018.
What are the recommended changes to the Enterprise PDM 2012, 2013 and 2014 convert task script under advanced scripting options in order to avoid empty drawing model views in the converted output file (PDF, eDrawings® etc.)?
If the SolidWorks drawing that is being processed by the Enterprise PDM convert task contains multiple inactive sheets that require updating and the convert task executes when the SolidWorks session is minimized or runs in the background on the task host, it is possible that views in the inactive sheets could end up missing geometry and content in the converted output file.
Please refer to Solution ID: S-065824 for more information about how to avoid and solve this problem.
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That’s it for this month. Thanks for reading this edition of SOLIDWORKS Support News.
Originally posted by Julien Boissat in the SOLIDWORKS Tech Blog
