Scope out how your next designs will be structured with SOLIDWORKS Treehouse.  A great tool for managers and designers alike, the intuitive user interface allows you to plan how your assembly will be arranged before you actually start designing.  Treehouse enables you to name your components, drag in existing designs, create configurations, and add custom properties all before doing any new design work in SOLIDWORKS.  SOLIDWORKS Treehouse is accessed from the SOLIDWORKS Tools applications suite and can be run independent of SOLIDWORKS.

Arrange Assemblies, Parts, and Drawings

Drag visual representations of your SOLIDWORKS templates and already created parts, assemblies, and drawing files to build a hierarchy of assemblies, parts and drawings.  Re-arrange the documents by simply dragging components to their updated position in the tree.  Fill in any custom properties defined on the document templates.

Export to SOLIDWORKS and Automatically Create Files

Once you are satisfied with your layout, you can export the hierarchy to SOLIDWORKS documents.  Treehouse will automatically create SOLIDWORKS documents in the location you specify.  These documents will reference each other according to the structure defined in Treehouse.  You can now start the detail work on your design.

Visualize an Existing SOLIDWORKS Assembly in SOLIDWORKS Treehouse

If you want a fast way to see the assembly tree structure of a complicated assembly, just drag the assembly into SOLIDWORKS Treehouse.  The assembly structure will automatically populate and display, thereby making it much easier to understand complex assembly structures.

Simplify conceptual design of products and machinery with powerful SOLIDWORKS 3D design tools. SOLIDWORKS conceptual design capabilities enable you work with all types of conceptual design data, including sketches, images, Adobe® Illustrator® files, 3D scan data, and existing 3D and 2D CAD data. That makes your design process faster, saves time and development costs, and increases productivity.

Conceptual Design Overview

SOLIDWORKS conceptual design capabilities enable you to quickly create diverse product designs from simple products to large designs with complex mechanisms, such as packaging machinery. Conceptual design tools include:

• Assembly Layout Sketches to quickly layout a basic sketch to define locations for components or equipment, and then make later sketch changes to relocate items you’ve designed that are mated to the sketch
• Mechanism Layout Sketches to define mechanisms using only sketch segments that can be dragged to demonstrate desired mechanism motion
• Reuse of existing SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD data, and importing 3D and 2D CAD data from other systems
• Importing image files or scanned paper sketches
• Auto-Trace functionality for converting and sketching with imported images
• Powerful surfacing tools to generate organic, stylized shapes for products, enclosures, or packaging
• ScanTo3D that leverages imported 3D scan data and significantly reduces the time to build complex 3D models from non-digital data (available in SOLIDWORKS Premium)

Check out our Knowledge Base Tips and Tricks Videos and Step by Step Tutorials 

You work fast with the easily customizable SOLIDWORKS user interface so you can work the way you want to, dramatically boosting your productivity. With bidirectional associativity, any changes you make to your 3D model or 2D drawing are automatically replicated. Make a change to one and the other updates as well, keeping all your files current and accurate.

Both full-time and occasional 3D CAD users can customize tools to get their tasks done faster:

• Customize toolbars, in-context menus, hotkeys, and environment settings
• Simply gesture with your mouse for fast command access
• Automatically perform design functions through API and batch processing capabilities