As you all know SOLIDWORKS 2018 added significant new functionality as well as many new products to our product development ecosystem to fully support your ability to quickly take your good ideas and transform them into innovative, great new products. We introduced tools that facilitated the design of smart, connected products as well as new CAM tools to help you jump start your smart manufacturing initiatives.
With all these very important pieces of the extended product portfolio in place, this year’s release focuses on what’s most important to you: improving your day-to-day productivity. Of course, we’ve added some amazing new functionality, in fact way too many to include in this blog. Let’s take a look at some of them, but first let’s talk about some of the improvements made in SOLIDWORKS 2019 that will help you get your job done faster on a day-to-day basis.
Quality
With SOLIDWORKS 2019, our R&D team has made quality and performance a top priority, spending well over half their time on this effort, which will allow us to deliver more customer-centric enhancements than any major release for the past five years. You will also see many nice performance improvements, starting with faster download of the Installation Manager, smarter drawing update to reduce drawing rebuilds, dramatic performance improvements in eDrawings graphics display, as well as, a new open progress dialog for Drawings that lets you easily skip the loading of additional sheets.
Assembly Performance
Performance improvements can be seen in many areas of SOLIDWORKS 2019, but no more so than in the new functionality for working with large assemblies. SOLIDWORKS 2019 provides you with huge graphics performance gains and optimized workflows so you have the confidence to design even the most complex large assemblies with ease.
In SOLIDWORKS 2019 you can leverage Large Design Review Mode to open assemblies in seconds and work with what’s important. The enhanced DeFeature tool (image below) enables you to create assemblies more efficiently while also protecting your Intellectual Property (IP). Creating and editing exploded views of your assemblies is also now easier and enhanced functionality helps you create complex assembly documentation and deliverables quickly and easily.
Embrace new technology
SOLIDWORKS 2019 also enables you to take advantage of latest hardware and touch-enabled technology so you can leverage gesture sketching to quickly and intuitively capture design ideas whether you’re in the office or on the go. 3D Markup using touch and gesture sketching is available on any touch-enabled device running Windows 10.
This release also introduces SOLIDWORKS Extended Reality (XR), which provides an entirely new way for users to interact with their CAD models using Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. This new exporter, available in SOLIDWORKS Premium, Professional and Standard, enables users to export their CAD files directly to AR and VR applications to virtually explore their models and share these visualizations with customer or key stakeholders. Users wanting a more seamless experience can open their assemblies in a Virtual Reality environment using eDrawings Professional. The only extra hardware required is the VR headset.
Attention to detail
SOLIDWORKS 2019 adds many new enhancements that provide added depth to existing functionality, making it easier for users to capture a more complete digital representation of their design. Unique features, such as Tab and Slot, as well as many new user-requested options are now available; and new Mesh Modeling capabilities increase users’ ability to work with mesh geometry, streamlining reverse engineering and topology optimization.
Delivering a complete design ecosystem
I believe what sets SOLIDWORKS 2019 apart from other CAD products continues to be the breadth of the solutions that can take your team from concept to finished products faster than ever before. By closing the gap between all the various departments now tasked with delivering essential pieces of the product puzzle—from early concept design and detailed design, to electrical/electronic design to virtual testing and downstream to inspection and finally to manufacturing. SOLIDWORKS offers the integrated tools that enable all these stakeholders to work together concurrently so designs flow from process to process without the need for error-prone translations.
We’re very excited to roll out this amazing new release of SOLIDWORKS and hope to see you all at a VAR Launch Event where you can see for yourself how SOLIDWORKS 2019 will help you take your good ideas and transform them to market-ready, great products faster than ever. For more details on all the new enhancements in SOLIDWORKS 2019, be sure to check out the website.
Originally posted in the SOLIDWORKS Blog.