SolidWorks today unveiled SolidWorks 2006, the newest and most powerful version of the #1 3D mechanical design software it has been shipping to the mainstream market for nearly a decade. SolidWorks 2006 features a host of new and unique capabilities to help designers and engineers bring better products more quickly to market, and to more easily transition from 2D to 3D design.
The software includes more than 200 customer-requested enhancements and significant innovations that break new ground in engineering efficiency. These innovations include fundamentally new approaches that allow design engineers to analyze and validate designs as they work.
Included in SolidWorks 2006 are a multitude of improvements that simplify, accelerate, and integrate design engineering work, including:
- an exponential increase in performance;
- new user productivity tools such as Smart Components;
- new features for consumer product, sheet metal, and machine designers, such as Mounting Bosses, Snap Hooks, and Vents;
- new mainstream design validation capabilities that put sophisticated analysis in the hands of designers;
- innovations that significantly ease the migration from 2D to 3D design, such as 3D Drawing View and Design Checker, as well as enhancements to the DWG Series (Editor, Gateway, Viewer); and
- enhancements in SolidWorks Office Premium that empower design engineers across the entire spectrum of their activities.
In fact, all of these improvements are present in SolidWorks Office Premium, the company's complete 3D product design solution, and they confirm SolidWorks as the #1 3D mechanical design software for the mainstream market.
"SolidWorks 2006 is a significant leap," said Kevin Batty, drawing office manager of Kirk Ella Tool Design in the UK. "Not only does it include enhancements I've suggested to SolidWorks, but it includes many more useful new capabilities I never imagined. SolidWorks has again improved its intuitive user interface, making it simple to learn the new functions that are offered. Everyone can be a power user on some level."
Performance
Users are continuously demanding more from their mechanical design software, and SolidWorks has again answered the call in SolidWorks 2006 with the most significant release ever in terms of performance. Based on an analysis of actual customer usage patterns, the company focused performance enhancements in two areas - overall system architecture and common operations - with particularly dramatic gains in large assembly and drawing processing.
On the architecture side, SolidWorks has optimized its Lightweight file structure to allow for fast processing at all times in a wide range of commands such as mating, components insertion, interference detection, and section view. With SolidWorks 2006, users can now continue to work in drawings without waiting for drawing views or system graphics to be recalculated, saving valuable design time.
The second set of performance improvements makes the most common commands in SolidWorks software interactive and instantaneous, regardless of how big the assembly might become. Now, designers and engineers can move swiftly from task to task without waiting.
Additionally, SolidWorks 2006 will support the recently released Windows XP Professional x64 Edition operating system with a soon-to-be-released service pack. A native 64-bit version of SolidWorks 2006 is expected to ship later this year, promising further performance gains.
User Productivity
SolidWorks' new productivity capabilities save users time and effort across all of their design tasks, including selection, assembly visualization, drawing, and design reuse. New productivity features include the 3D Drawing View, which for the first time enables an engineer working in a 2D environment to visualize parts and assemblies in three dimensions. Users can pan, rotate, and zoom without leaving the drawing environment.
The new Display States feature provides unprecedented flexibility in defining an assembly's on-screen appearance in terms of color, texture, and transparency. For the first time, a model can have shaded components and wire frame components displayed together in the same assembly. These improvements make visualization easier, especially in large assemblies, enhancing understanding for everyone who sees them.
As with every release of the software, SolidWorks 2006 aims to help designers and engineers efficiently and accurately create production drawings for manufacturing. SolidWorks 2006 includes a Spell Checker to ensure the accuracy of annotations in any drawing, model, or bill of material, fostering timely delivery, professional presentation, and minimal revisions.
A new feature called Smart Components illustrates SolidWorks software's strength in configurations, helping designers and engineers automate time-consuming design processes that would be performed manually in other mechanical design software products. Based on fundamental engineering principles and user history, Smart Components automatically inserts parts with corresponding mounting features into new designs. Then it sizes them to diameters of mating parts.
Meanwhile, SolidWorks continues to do more than any other 3D mechanical design vendor to embrace customers who work with and maintain 2D files. SolidWorks recently announced the DWGgateway data translation software, which enables AutoCAD software users to open, edit, and save any version of a DWG file from AutoCAD version 2.0 to AutoCAD 2005, regardless of the version they own. This eliminates worries about version compatibility and the prospect of forced AutoCAD upgrades.
SolidWorks 2006 has also significantly enhanced the DWGeditor software tool released in SolidWorks 2005, which enables users familiar with AutoCAD software to edit legacy DWG files in their native format. SolidWorks 2006 adds the ability to cut and paste from a SolidWorks drawing directly into the DWGeditor, saving steps for the designer. Also, each seat of SolidWorks now comes with three licenses of the DWGeditor for 2D users. This decision exemplifies SolidWorks' commitment to supporting 2D design even as it pushes the boundaries of 3D design innovation.
Role-specific Functionality
Although SolidWorks 2006's improvements infuse efficiency into every design and engineering activity, SolidWorks Corporation has created specific enhancements for consumer product, sheet metal, and machine designers.
For consumer product designers, SolidWorks has dramatically improved 3D Sketch capabilities to help designers obtain more precise shapes in fewer steps, with real-time solving as users drag to reshape the concept. In SolidWorks 2006, designers and engineers can also create more designs with less reliance on 2D sketch geometry, thereby reducing the number of features needed to create complex shapes while enhancing the associativity between sketch entities. New Snap Hook, Snap Groove, and Mounting Boss features automate creation of frequently used plastic part design elements in a single command. SolidWorks 2006 also automatically imports Adobe Illustrator files into SolidWorks, saving designers work by automating the transition from concept to detailed sketch.
Sheet metal designers can work more productively than ever with a series of new capabilities to automate design work and documentation. Gauge Tables, for example, let users set up company standards for sheet metal properties in Excel spreadsheet software and automatically apply them to designs. And SolidWorks now enables designers and engineers to apply color to selected elements such as bend lines or formed features in flat pattern drawings to convey design intent. They can also insert notes that indicate bend direction and angle, and that are useful in driving automated bending machines.
Machine designers for the first time can combine multiple sketch entities into blocks that behave as single parts for easy, high-performance fit and function testing in assemblies, or conversion to 3D assembly models. Only in SolidWorks is it this easy to test a mechanism in 2D then automatically generate an associative 3D assembly. SolidWorks has also introduced a unique Variable Pitch Helix to help machine designers easily create systems for speeding or slowing goods being shuttled through feed or packaging systems.
Mainstream Design Validation
SolidWorks has significantly moved design validation further into the mainstream by expanding its embedded analysis capabilities. Front-line designers and engineers, not just analysis specialists, can do more to troubleshoot their designs as they work, thus avoiding the wasted time and cost of failed prototypes. Now, for example, when a designer or engineer runs a physical simulation, force and restraint data is automatically defined and loaded into COSMOSXpress design validation software for quick stress analysis on individual parts within the assembly. This answers two fundamental questions at once: How does my design work? and Will it stand up to stress and strain within the assembly?
SolidWorks Office Premium, which includes COSMOSWorks Designer validation software, incorporates new tools to help designers efficiently integrate analysis with design work. The unique new Analysis Advisor is an interactive wizard that helps designers and engineers choose the appropriate analysis for their tasks, respond if an analysis fails, and interpret results accurately. A new Analysis Library packages frequently needed analysis inputs, such as forces and constraints, into templates called Analysis Libraries that eliminate the repetitive work.
SolidWorks has created other special enhancements that make life easier for engineers in the areas of data management, compliance, and communication. SolidWorks PDMWorks product data management software now includes Automatic Change Notification, a feature that informs users via instant message when shared files have been modified by another team member. This innovation ensures users are always working on correct versions. PDMWorks now automatically checks in and checks out COSMOS design validation results, ensuring users capture and vault all their design information in one simple step.
SolidWorks Design Checker, another innovation, lets SolidWorks users check a 2D design for 34 important company-specific properties - such as completeness, fonts, errors, layer conventions, and title blocks - in a single command. This makes it easy for design engineers to meet their organization's internal design standards, saving companies time and cost of manual markups, revisions, and rechecks.
A new Camera feature places customers, partners, suppliers, and colleagues "inside" users' designs, with control over perspective, depth of field, and design walk-through for better visualization. Rounding out SolidWorks 2006, SolidWorks' eDrawings Professional email-enabled design viewer is now available for Macintosh users, dramatically expanding the universe of users who can now collaborate in reviewing engineers' 2D and 3D product design data.
"Our mission is cultivating a thriving 3D design engineering community, starting with the individual user, and our goal is to document progress every day," said John McEleney, CEO of SolidWorks Corporation. "That's why we've listened so closely to our customers and invested so much in the product to come up with innovations worthy of SolidWorks 2006. We hope designers, engineers, and their customers will be pleased with the results, as they have been for the past 10 years."