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Just as I promised, I got one of the videos about Animation ready. This one is about the easiest part: using the Animation Wizard to create animations of exploded/collapsed assemblies and rotations. I apologize if the video is not the best, more in particular the audio of the video (I kind of don’t like my voice), but I still hope someone out there finds it useful.  Enjoy!

 

 

Well, I just got an email from Kenneth to let all members know the meeting that was scheduled to happen on September 9^th has been cancelled due to lack of interest/response. That’s a real bummer for me because I was going to do a presentation on creating simple animations using SolidWorks Motion Manager.  Anyway, just to get it out of my system, I think I’ll make a couple of videos about it with what I had prepared and post them here, instead. How about that? I hope I can get them ready this weekend.

I have a few questions for those of you that have attended this group’s meetings before: What happened?  Why the lack of interest?  Was it the topic (rendering and animation)? What can get you guys excited again? And for those of you that are in the area of attendance for this user group and have never been to one of the meetings, please, consider attending next one! This is a very young group, I know, but it has great potential.  We’ve had some really interesting meetings in the past, great guest speakers, and some very cool prizes too.  And, besides, it’s only a few hours every two or three months, but you can learn a lot and benefit from networking with other local users, so please think about it.

Enjoy your weekend and keep an eye for some videos about Animation coming up real soon!

On a terribly off-topic note, today was the first day of school on this side of California. My little one is finally a kindergartener, which leaves some free time for me to go back to school and take at least one or two classes this fall.  So, I didn’t win the lotto, haven’t got that super-duper job I’ve been wishing for, and even some project I was very excited about ended up being a bit of a disappointment, but still, somehow  things are looking brighter and I’m feeling positive.  Even my dog, which had been pronounced hopeless beyond recovery by three different specialists that practically gave us a choice to undergo expensive surgeries and procedures or just put him down, is now completely recovered, eating, drinking, playing, and well, just back to his old happy self… and without any surgeries! Could it be the power of prayer? Or call it positive thinking? Who knows!

I’ve received a great amount of emails asking all kinds of questions about SolidWorks. I’ve answered some, as I find the time, but there’s just way too many. I recommend to those of you who need an answer right away that you check out the SolidWorks forums. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced users that visit those forums every day and I’m sure they can answer almost any question you may have faster than I can go through all my email. Still, it’s always a pleasure to be able to help!

For those of you with the questions about how to prepare for the CSWP, let me tell you that there isn’t an official guide for this test, like the one that exists for the CSWA. There’s not one book you can buy or class or video that will completely prepare you for it. I mean, there are, you can find them with Solid Professor, Igetit, and others. You can also buy the SolidWorks Bible, Tickoo’s book “SolidWorks for Designers”, a few of the many books written by Dave and Marie Planchard or splurge on some lessons from your VAR, and it’s good training and it will increase your general knowledge of SolidWorks,  but the best you can do is work with SolidWorks. Practice your skills all the time, create as many models as you can, learn from your mistakes, investigate what the features do and ask around, read the blogs, interact with other users at work or school, post your questions at the online forums, or take them with you to your next  SolidWorks User Group meeting. If you need something to model, grab an old book on Technical Drawing and model the parts and assemblies that come inside, and then modify them.  Look for new ways to achieve the same results. And, most importantly, have fun.

Fun?  Is this woman crazy? Well, yes, there’s that… But that doesn’t affect the fact that I really mean having fun. OK, it’s true, fun is not precisely what we typically associate with a test, but it’s important to at least enjoy the learning process.  Don’t worry so much about the test, worry about becoming proficient with SolidWorks and take your time to explore to your heart’s content.  I learned this the hard way. Before taking the CSWP test, I was so worried about the score I would get that it’s all I could think about. I wasn’t having much fun.  Now I’ve decided that any other test I take from now on I’ll try not to worry so much about, just prepare the best I can and have hope.

And now I’m just rambling. Next post will much more interesting, I promise.

 

 

Just as I promised before, here’s a bit more of what’s new in SolidWorks 2010. This time, let me tell you about some improvements that have been made to the user interface for the Simulation products. Simulation Xpress got some of the biggest changes.

I must confess I hadn’t checked any of this out until after I heard about it while visiting DS SolidWorks offices in Massachusetts a few weeks ago.  What we’re going to see now is that the workflow of the user interface in Simulation Xpress has been changed so that it works just like the rest of the Simulation products. So now you’ll see that when you go to the Simulation Xpress Analysis Wizard it starts in a task pane, just like regular Simulation advisor does too, and you’re going to find that it goes through a lot of the same steps as the core Simulation advisor does. Notice also the links available, such as this one over here about free online training on SolidWorks Simulation Fundamentals.  If you click on it, it will take you to a website where you can access free online training opportunities on Simulation Xpress.

The task pane on the wizard works a bit like an index that tells us where we are and what we need to do. It sort of walks us through the whole process and also goes adding checkmarks next to those steps that have already been completed.  Furthermore, when we hover over the hyperlinks included in the task pane, we get visual examples and additional information that applies to each of these steps specifically. For instance, in this image you can see the kind of visual information I get about fixtures.

In this other one you can see one of the many examples of forces that are provided. These are actually very nice animations, by the way, but of course you can’t appreciate that in the screenshot.

Notice how the user interface looks exactly the same as the one in regular Simulation.

 One thing that has been added with this new release and that wasn’t available in Simulation Xpress before is the ability to change mesh density from coarse to fine. It’s a global mesh density, though, no localized mesh control.

After running the Simulation, results will begin to be provided right away, using the same solver Simulation does, and once it’s finished the wizard will ask if this is the way you were expecting your part to deform. If it’s not what you were expecting, you can always go back to change fixtures or loads that were previously added. 

If, however, this is what you were expecting, it will go ahead and create a Simulation Study that you can then take right into the core Simulation product. This is also something new in this release, and the main idea behind allowing you to do this is to provide consistency for those users that may be working inside a team where part of the engineers may not have Simulation while others do, as well as make life easier for those users that perhaps started out with the SolidWorks Standard version and could be thinking of upgrading to SolidWorks Premium, for instance.  They will no longer feel like they have to re-learn how to do simulation, because it will look, feel and work just the same way.

Although the optimization process is not precisely something new, notice once more the change in the user interface.  After viewing results, as usual, the wizard will ask if we desire to optimize the model. Notice how the new changes in the user interface make it easier to keep track of what we’re doing and our goals in this optimization process. In this example, we have the variable to optimize (one of the dimensions in the part), minimum and maximum values for that variable, our constraint (maximum stress value), and our goal which is to minimize the part’s overall mass.

After a few iterations, we obtain an optimum value for our dimension according to our goals and constraints. In Simulation Xpress we can’t however, see the values of all the other different iterations, only the optimum.

But these are not the only changes in the user interface. Simulation (not Xpress) also got a few ones of its own. For instance, check out what happens when you hover over in the graphics area; you get instant feedback on loads and fixtures as you hover over these items. And not only that, but also by simply double clicking on their icons, you can now easily edit loads and fixtures as needed.

Other small improvements are, for instance, when presenting results; it now shows them in floating decimal notation by default, instead of scientific. This is sort of a response to the struggle many users seemed to have with that kind of scientific notation. Plus, you can now use comma separators! I know, not a big deal, but all those zeros can be confusing.

All throughout Simulation you’ll see that you’ll now be able to edit the definition of several similar items at the same time, like this group of bolt connectors, for instance. All you have to do is Shift + Select them all and then right click and choose Edit Definition, then make the changes you need to do and they will apply to all the bolt connectors in the list you selected. That simple!

In Simulation, the advisor now goes a lot deeper than before while walking you through the process, asking better questions than before and providing several examples and visual aids.

Little enhancements, perhaps, but they help improve the user’s work experience and that’s what this is all about.

Stay tuned, more to come soon! And make sure to check out all the other SolidWorks blogs, as well as SolidWorks brand new website, to find out about all that you’ve been missing if you haven’t been Beta testing this year.

A very cool product we heard about while at SolidWorks headquarters in Concord was what is called Sustainability Xpress, which will be included in every seat of SolidWorks 2010. To talk to us about it we had Jeremy Regnerus and Rich Chin, who was virtually present via remote conference.

It’s easy to see that the folks at SolidWorks are really excited about the introduction of this product, perhaps because sustainable design is becoming very important these days and specially with the automobile industry. Most everybody out there is now trying to “go green” some way or another, and even when not every single user may think they can take advantage of this new tool, SolidWorks knows there are quite a few users out there that can greatly benefit from it right now. So the way they went into this new venture was by partnering with PE International, which is the leader in sustainable design and have been implementing products and collecting data from different regions in the world for over twenty years. The idea was to take the knowledge and information provided by PE International and integrate it into SolidWorks in a way that was extremely easy to use for everyone. Jeremy compared this to the way it was when COSMOS Xpress first came out, extremely simple, extremely easy to use and completely integrated inside SolidWorks.

Jeremy pointed out that most of the time, engineers and designers don’t have any idea of how their designs can make a difference on the environment. They don’t know the real impact that adding or removing a feature, or choosing a different material or manufacturing process can actually have, so they are trying to make all of that obvious through the use of Sustainability Xpress.  And they are not just talking about making sure if the product is recyclable or not, which is what most of us usually associate with “green design”, but they are actually looking beyond that through a process they call lifecycle assessment, that actually takes into consideration everything that goes on from the extraction of any materials needed, transportation, pre-processing, manufacturing processes involved, consumer life cycle of the product and how it is going to be recycled or disposed off at the end of its useful life. This assessment is also different depending on where in the world it’s taking place, since different countries look at recycling and manufacturing processes in different ways.  

So, when assessing the impact that your design has on the environment, Sustainability Xpress is actually looking at the following four areas:

·         Carbon emissions:  A measure of Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions

·         Energy consumption: A measure of non-renewable energy sources associated with the part’s  entire lifecycle

·         Air Acidification: This is a measure of the amount of Sulfur Dioxide that is produced during the part’s lifecycle and that will impact the environment by increasing the acidity of rain water, thus making land and water toxic for plants and animals

·         Water  Eutrophication: This  measures the impact of the process in which an excess of nutrients such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous are released into the water as waste, causing an overabundance of algae which depletes the water from oxygen,  making it unsuitable to sustain vegetable or animal life

Jeremy showed us an example of how Sustainability Xpress would help us create a better design for a part that is commonly used inside a computer. The part can be made as sheet metal or plastic, and the decision over the kind of material and process to use, as well as where in the world the part will be manufactured and consumed can make a big difference, since different countries use different sources of energy to power the manufacturing processes and not all countries are big about recycling. All this information has already been collected and organized by PE International and is presented in a very simple way when using Sustainability Xpress in SolidWorks 2010. Basically, all you need to do is tell SolidWorks your selection for material, manufacturing process and where your part will be manufactured and used, then you’ll obtain information about the impact of your design in the environment (carbon emissions, energy consumption, air and water pollution) based on your choices. In these two images you can see how the information on environmental impact (the pie charts at the  bottom) changes as you input information for your choice of material, manufacturing process, region of the world where it will be manufactured, as well as information about  transportation and use.

 

A very cool tool included with Sustainability Xpress is the Find Similar material, which allows you to find materials with mechanical properties that are similar to your first choice and compare the impact that manufacturing your part in any of these other materials would have on the environment.  As Rich Chin pointed out, something even cooler about this tool is that it can help create some awareness and curiosity among engineers and designers as they experiment with it and discover the ways their design choices impact the environment for good or for worse. The first image below shows the process of choosing the mechanical properties for comparison and the second image shows the list of similar materials that were found. As we select each of these similar materials, Sustainability Xpress will show how each of them impacts the environment as compared to the original one. Notice at the bottom of the second image that the material highlighted has a negative impact on Air and Water.

 

 

Once you are done doing your lifecycle assessment, you can then share your results with others by producing a word document that contains an image of your design and all the information on material, processes, and environmental impact that was provided by Sustainability Xpress. The coolest thing about this is that (coming soon) you will also be able to access a website where you can get information about these results in ways that are easier to visualize and understand, like comparing the results of carbon emissions generated during the lifecycle of the product to what the equivalent would be to driving a certain number of miles in an American car, a European car, etc.

So far, PE International has collected data for those countries and regions of the world that use their products or services for sustainable design; information is still missing for a few other regions of the word, such as South America, Africa and Australia, so you are not going to find any information about them in Sustainability Xpress, but they hope that as more users take advantage of their products and become aware of sustainable design, more information will be collected in the future.  This is a huge effort, actually, if you think about it, but SolidWorks hopes they can keep their users regularly updated if any new information on processes or materials is added to the database.  So far, however, Sustainability Xpress doesn’t support custom materials, only those available in SolidWorks list of materials, which, by the way, has been expanded in 2010 and is supposed to also be linked to Simulation, so now it will all be integrated together nicely.

While Sustainability Xpress will be available in every seat of SolidWorks 2010, they are expecting to launch Sustainability as a standalone product in the fall. This is SolidWorks Sustainability for those that are really serious about it!  Just as with the simulation products, there are things that you can’t do in Xpress that you will be able to do with the standalone version. For instance, Sustainability Xpress supports only parts; the standalone version will support assemblies and configurations, allowing you to make comparisons between different designs, as well as iterations in order to find the optimum one. 

And just in case all this information wasn’t enough for you, you can always go directly to PE International, since they are experts in sustainability and they not only create cutting edge software products for sustainable design (check out SoFi and GaBi), but they also provide individual assessment to companies of all kinds, such as Bayer, Siemens, Toyota, and Volkswagen, among many others, and will be glad to assist you one on one.  

So, go ahead, check out Sustainability Xpress in SolidWorks 2010 and see for yourself if this is something you can use to improve your designs and make a positive difference for the environment while you’re at it.