Each year our users give us thousands of their best ideas and our development team delivers! Let’s take a look at four highlights in SOLIDWORKS 2020 that will enhance every user’s experience.
Have you ever wished you could compress, extend, or stretch parts in an assembly in real-time? Now in SOLIDWORKS 2020, you can, with Flexible Components! This new feature brings life to products in even more detail—no need for configurations, copies of files, or making any changes to standard library components.
Change is a natural part of the design process. Say you have a complex extrude feature that you need to break into two seperate features to support multiple configurations. In this situation, it’s possible that downstream fillets and/or chamfers can lose their references. The Fillet and Chamfer Edge Repair enhancement in SOLIDWORKS 2020 now automatically helps users re-attach new edge references if they’ve been lost.
Many designers create geometry that is slightly larger or smaller than the original shape. This is common in molds and dies, as well as tooling and packaging. Surface Offset is the go-to capability for this type of modeling, but previously, problems could arise if small surfaces couldn’t be offset the desired amount. Now, in SOLIDWORKS 2020, surfaces too small to offset are automatically identified in the Feature Manager. These faces can be viewed and removed from the feature all at once to generate surface results that exclude the problem areas.
Scanned mesh models are increasingly common—whether for reverse engineering or inspection of manufactured pieces. Now with SOLIDWORKS 2020, 3D Body Compare allows you can overlay any mesh data against the SOLIDWORKS part to visualize and quantify the deviation. This is an incredibly powerful method to validate your process by comparing the CAD model to the manufactured part.
With new enhancements like Flexible Components, Fillet and Chamfer Edge Repair, Surface Offset improvements, and 3D Body Compare, SOLIDWORKS 2020 continues to provide the best CAD user experience in the industry!
Originally posted in the SOLIDWORKS Tech Blog.