Create and edit complex solid and surface geometry, including stylish curve-continuous (C2) surfaces with powerful, easy-to-use SOLIDWORKS 3D design. SOLIDWORKS advanced surface design tools accelerate your design process, saving time and development costs, and increasing productivity.
Advanced Surface Design Overview
SOLIDWORKS simplifies advanced surface design to make creating sophisticated parts with complex shapes much easier. Such devices are common across a range of industries, including consumer products, vehicles, molds, and medical devices. SOLIDWORKS provides you with:
- Tools for: Extruded, Revolved, Swept, Lofted Offset, Planar Surfaces
- Tools for: Organic and Stylized Shapes Boundary Surface, Surface Fill, Freeform Radiated Surface, Mid Surface
- Editing tools: Move/Copy Face, Instant3D (click and drag geometry), Copy Surface, Replace Face, Healing, Knit, Trim, and Extend
- Surface analysis tools: Gaussian, Draft, Undercut, Thickness, Curvature, Min radius, Zebra Stripes, Deviation analysis, and Symmetry Check
- Geometry Import and Repair and Healing tools
- Plastic part/mold filling simulation tools (available in SOLIDWORKS Plastics)
Simplify design of large assemblies with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD to handle designs that can contain more than 100,000 parts—a common demand in many industries. SOLIDWORKS easy-to-use capabilities help you manage, assemble, view, and document your large design to accelerate your design process, save time and development costs, and increase productivity.
Large Assembly Design Overview
The benefits of 3D modeling for managing and visualizing your design increase as the size and complexity of the product increases. A wide range of large assembly design tools in SOLIDWORKS make this possible including:
- Configurations enable both detailed and simplified versions of a product to be designed
- Large Assembly Mode automatically activates software performance options which can be set to trigger automatically whenever assemblies exceed a certain number of components
- Large Design Review, the fastest way to open and investigate a large assembly, streamlines quick overviews and editing of large designs
- AssemblyXpert provides recommendations, such as SOLIDWORKS performance settings, to speed up large assembly design
- Exploded views document and explain your product design and help with planning for downstream manufacturing steps
- “Magnetic” mating of components allows users to quickly snap an assembly together, thereby significantly reducing the time to complete a large assembly
SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software gives designers simple ways to quickly create and adjust 3D model geometry using direct model editing. Simply click on the model geometry and move it, speeding up design, saving time and development costs, and increasing productivity.
Direct Model Editing Overview
Easy-to-use direct model editing enables designers to quickly make changes to their 3D model:
- Direct Edit Toolbar enables you to copy, move, split, replace, offset, push, and drag geometry to create the result you want.
- Patterns instantly create SOLIDWORKS features, faces, and solid bodies with a simple click made directly on the geometry to be patterned.
- Direct Edit capabilities automatically convert non-native, imported model geometry into intelligent SOLIDWORKS features that can be modified parametrically or through direct geometry manipulation.
- Instant3D capabilities let you drag geometry and dimension manipulators to create and modify features.
- Live Section capabilities can be used to dynamically section models with any plane and then drag the section outline to make a change in the 3D model. Click on the model and then you can move, copy, and rotate surfaces and solid bodies to modify geometry.
