Philip Thomas was originally going to do a presentation on ‘dumb’ solids and how to deal with them in SolidWorks. He was encouraged by Wes to open up his presentation to whatever he felt was relevant to the group. Philip was under the impression that this meeting was the inaugural meeting for our group and he had his presentation somewhat geared to that end. Being the great public speaker that he is he was able to change up his presentation on the fly and make the whole thing both educational and entertaining.
He started off by mentioning some SolidWorks news:
1. SolidWorks 2010 will be the last release to support Windows XP. SolidWorks policy is to support an operating system one more year after Microsoft ends its support. He informed the group that Windows 7 is preferred over Vista and in my experience I whole heartily agree with him. SKIP Vista and go to 7.
2. SolidWorks 2010 is the last release that will include PhotoWorks. The replacement is PhotoView 360. We had this in SW2009 and if you’ve tried it then you already know it is much easier for the casual user to get a good looking rendering from it.
Since Philip was thinking it was our 1st meeting he did a little on the benefits of a user group to its members and our responsibilities to support it.
We get knowledge, experience, contacts, increased value and new friends from a user group. We see product demos, case studies, show and tell and guest presenters. We get a sense of community and support from SolidWorks Corporate…And of course great food!
We need to give back to the group with our participation, support, contribution and effort. Did I mention that we need a hospitality chairperson? Encourage all your co-workers to get involved with the group. Talk to your boss; encourage him to ‘encourage’ your co-workers. Ask him how he can help support the group.
Philip seamlessly went into his history of CAD presentation. I did a bit of research on some of the people he talked about and this is what I found:
The Engineering Design Revolution: The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering
By David E. Weisberg
See the video below of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
Next Philip did his dumb solids presentation where he imports an IGES file that originally came from CATIA. He showed us the undocumented “keep mashing buttons” method of healing an imported solid that has a bunch of errors. He then demonstrated how he was able to clean up the remaining problems with the solid using the standard tools available in SolidWorks. He touched on the inability of SolidWorks to directly import CATIA files, I’m not going there! But he showed us how Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended can open a CATIA part or assembly file and export an IGES or STEP file. And all this for only $699! Excuse me but why should I have to hit my boss up for this when SolidWorks and CATIA are the same company? Oops, I said I wasn’t going there.
Philip went on to show the wrong way and the correct way to use FeatureWorks. This boiled down to using a combination of automatic and interactive reorganization and was very beneficial to me and I’m sure others in the group.
The last thing I noted during the presentation was Ambient Occlusion. I was thinking I had misunderstood Philip. I went to the SolidWorks Labs page and could not find a download that gave you this ability. I did find this: http://labs.solidworks.com/Blog/post.aspx?id=40 which involves changing some registry settings. There must be an easier way, please somebody correct me.
Other things that Philip discussed but I did not take notes on were direct editing and how SolidWorks has it (he showed us) and how the other CAD vendors have made up a lot of hype concerning it. Oh yeah there was something about husbands and angels!
Read more after the video...
He started off by mentioning some SolidWorks news:
1. SolidWorks 2010 will be the last release to support Windows XP. SolidWorks policy is to support an operating system one more year after Microsoft ends its support. He informed the group that Windows 7 is preferred over Vista and in my experience I whole heartily agree with him. SKIP Vista and go to 7.
2. SolidWorks 2010 is the last release that will include PhotoWorks. The replacement is PhotoView 360. We had this in SW2009 and if you’ve tried it then you already know it is much easier for the casual user to get a good looking rendering from it.
Since Philip was thinking it was our 1st meeting he did a little on the benefits of a user group to its members and our responsibilities to support it.
We get knowledge, experience, contacts, increased value and new friends from a user group. We see product demos, case studies, show and tell and guest presenters. We get a sense of community and support from SolidWorks Corporate…And of course great food!
We need to give back to the group with our participation, support, contribution and effort. Did I mention that we need a hospitality chairperson? Encourage all your co-workers to get involved with the group. Talk to your boss; encourage him to ‘encourage’ your co-workers. Ask him how he can help support the group.
Philip seamlessly went into his history of CAD presentation. I did a bit of research on some of the people he talked about and this is what I found:
The Engineering Design Revolution: The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering
By David E. Weisberg
See the video below of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
Next Philip did his dumb solids presentation where he imports an IGES file that originally came from CATIA. He showed us the undocumented “keep mashing buttons” method of healing an imported solid that has a bunch of errors. He then demonstrated how he was able to clean up the remaining problems with the solid using the standard tools available in SolidWorks. He touched on the inability of SolidWorks to directly import CATIA files, I’m not going there! But he showed us how Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended can open a CATIA part or assembly file and export an IGES or STEP file. And all this for only $699! Excuse me but why should I have to hit my boss up for this when SolidWorks and CATIA are the same company? Oops, I said I wasn’t going there.
Philip went on to show the wrong way and the correct way to use FeatureWorks. This boiled down to using a combination of automatic and interactive reorganization and was very beneficial to me and I’m sure others in the group.
The last thing I noted during the presentation was Ambient Occlusion. I was thinking I had misunderstood Philip. I went to the SolidWorks Labs page and could not find a download that gave you this ability. I did find this: http://labs.solidworks.com/Blog/post.aspx?id=40 which involves changing some registry settings. There must be an easier way, please somebody correct me.
Other things that Philip discussed but I did not take notes on were direct editing and how SolidWorks has it (he showed us) and how the other CAD vendors have made up a lot of hype concerning it. Oh yeah there was something about husbands and angels!
Read more after the video...
The meeting closed out with Mark Hatley of Rapid Sheet Metal telling us about his company and how they can be of assistance with those short run and prototype sheet metal parts. Rapid Sheet Metal has been a sponsor of our group for several years providing us with great door prizes and support. Last night $100 of Home Depot gift cards were handed out. Hey and my name was the first one drawn. I'm keeping silent about it or the wife will have me painting something this weekend!