Welcome to this new edition of the SOLIDWORKS Support Monthly News, coauthored by members of the SOLIDWORKS Technical Support teams worldwide.
SOLIDWORKS World 2014 Proceedings Website Now Available!
Thank you to all of you who attended and participated in SOLIDWORKS World 2014, making this year’s event a huge success!
The SOLIDWORKS World proceedings website is now publically available. Please visit http://www.solidworks.com/sww/proceedings/ to access the content from this year’s event, as well as previous events (2012 and 2013).
Be sure to take full advantage of this year’s proceedings website – watch breakout session videos, download breakout session presentations, and check out photos from this year’s event. You can also view the 2014 highlights video and videos from general session each day.
We hope to see you at SOLIDWORKS World 2015, from February 8-11th at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona!
Spotlight on features – Improvements to the Animation PropertyManager in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2014
You may not have caught it because nothing visually changed in the Animation PropertyManager of SOLIDWORKS Simulation, but it benefits from many improvements in version 2014. The result is a more explicit, understandable and useable animation of your results plots. The improvements are listed below:
- The playback speed can be much slower than previously possible to give you more time to visualize each frame.
- The previous limit of 100 steps for the animation has been increased to 1000. Note that the available memory on your system may not be enough to animate that many steps for larger models.
- For Nonlinear, Transient Thermal and Time History studies, the default Step increment is equal to 1, allowing you to easily animate all time steps.
- Bolt connector symbols update location and orientation with the deformed geometry.
A big thank you to the developers 
.
Spotlight on features – Sheet metal: Flat Pattern Performance improvements anyone?
Anyone who has worked in sheet metal and feature patterns know that flat pattern a part can be a resource demanding operation.
A good portion of the time a sheet metal part takes to flat pattern a body is used by the system to check for feature self-intersections.
A good way to improve the flat pattern performance of those heavy feature patterned bodies is by removing the self-intersection verification from the operation. By unchecking Verification on Rebuild the system will skip the self-intersection verification.
Spotlight on features – Scale Sketch with first dimension in SOLIDWORKS 2014
Do you remember the days when either you needed to sketch a somewhat proportionally sketch or risk blowing this out of proportion when the first dimension was added to sketch?
Well, welcome to the 2014 “Scale Sketch with first dimension” functionality.
Assume you have he following sketch, you place the first dimension and the change this from 100 mm to 300 mm
In SOLIDWORKS 2013 this would have happened.
in version 2014 the same process would automatically proportionally scale the whole sketch based on the first dimension.
A few additional points about this functionality:
- The scaled sketch will maintain its relation to the origin just as it was before the scaling was applied.
- After the scale is applied the view will either “zoom to fit” or automatically change the zoom scaling giving the impression that the scale has not been changed.
Noteworthy Solutions from the SOLIDWORKS Knowledge Base
What could cause SOLIDWORKS Hole Wizard and Toolbox to fail after Kaspersky anti-virus update?
SOLIDWORKS Technical Support is currently investigating an issue affecting SOLIDWORKS users that are running Hole Wizard and Toolbox on machines with Kaspersky anti-virus software installed.
Under these conditions, users may find that SOLIDWORKS will generate the following master database error when accessing the Hole Wizard and Toolbox:
Database Setup Error: Unable to open master database due to the following database access error: “Cannot open the Microsoft Jet engine workgroup information file.”
The issue has been found to be related to a Kaspersky Anti-virus update that was released on April 9, 2014.
To fix this issue, follow the procedure in Solution Id: S-065816
You can also search for SPR 778949 in the Knowledge Base and add yourself to the notification list.
What are the firewall settings required for SOLIDWORKS Electrical?
The collaborative server runs as a service to monitor the constant bi-directional communication between the SQL server and the client machines. This happens through the ports 26666 to 26672. In some cases, it is seen that enabling the firewall restricts this bi-directional communication. Therefore in those cases it is recommended to turn OFF the Firewalls to have an uninterrupted communication.
However, where the Firewalls have to be turned ON, it is suggested that the SOLIDWORKS Electrical program should be manually allowed to communicate through the Windows® Firewall using the Allowed Programs command in ‘Control Panel\System and Security\Windows Firewall’. Also, please make sure that ports 26666 to 26672 are open so that the bi-directional communication is not barred. Since these changes are related to system security, the IT specialists should be involved.
From Solution Id: S-064620
”Unable to interpolate nodal temperatures in thermal stress analysis” error message
When running a static or nonlinear study with temperatures imported from a thermal study, the error Unable to interpolate nodal temperatures in thermal stress analysis may appear. To overcome it, please refer to the procedure in Solution Id: S-065460
Why can’t a User Defined Machine be added to the SOLIDWORKS Plastics Injection Molding Machine Database in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2014?
The Machine Database is now a “reference document” in 2014, and it has no impact on a Plastics simulation. Essentially, the Machine Database could be removed from the 2014 Plastics software and there would be no loss of functionality.
See Solution Id: S-065384
What could be a reason that double-clicking (or right-click open) a file in an Enterprise PDM vault view does not open a particular file type with associated application, but opening the same file in a local Explorer folder does open the file?
The most common reason that a particular file type will not open up in the correct application when double-clicking or using right-click open on a file stored in an Enterprise PDM file vault view is that the file type association values under the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry hive are missing or pointing to incorrect application.
Windows has many different ways to launch a file in an application, some handled by Windows and others added by the application itself, but Enterprise PDM relies mainly on “standard” Windows API methods to figure out what application to use when Open command is called. This is often why you may encounter different behavior when trying same operation on a file in a local folder “outside” the Enterprise PDM vault view.
For more details on how to troubleshoot this issue, refer to the PDF attached to Solution Id: S-065141.
Originally posted by Julien Boissat in the SOLIDWORKS Tech Blog
