Learning Solidworks 15

[kroth]

Does anyone have any thoughts or experiences on learning Solidworks efficiently and thoroughly (and fast). Where and how does one dig in to lay a solid conceptual foundation capable of growing rapidly to fluid use of the program?

I am a mechanical engineer, and am working on learning Solidworks from a base of Autcad (have used A from ver2.7 to ver2002, however only as 2d layout and planning tool). For some reason, Solidworks simply doesn't click with me.

Is Solidworks really as easy to learn as resellers claim, does lengthy experience with Autocad block learning, or does it require substantial rote learning (vs conceptual oversight learning).

 

[MadMango]

SolidWorks is the same a MS Word in your example [blue]kroth[/blue].

There are so many different industries using SW, not every industry uses all aspects of the software. Myself, the products I design are about 80% sheet metal, 19% machined and 1% molded plastics. I don't do any surfacing, and I have never used PhotoWorks or Animator. But if something comes up that I need to do, but don't know how to do it, I only have to read through the online Help Index to get me where I need to be. The majority of questions I see being asked on some forums can be easily answered if people only used the Help Index.

In SW, you can create 2D sketches for layouts, and use these layouts to drive many different parts and assemblies. It takes some time to become adapt at using this method of design in SW, but once you get the hand of it, you will wonder how you ever made anything without them. The big thing to remember is that you don't have to sketch accurately in SW, just throw those sketch lines and arcs where ever you want them. Dimensions define sketch segments in SW, so once you get your basic sketches places, you refine them with dims.

[green]"But what... is it good for?"[/green]
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[SBaugh]

If you decide to use SW, then you need to ONLY use SW, if you want to understand it. If you do that and follow the online tutorials, and use the help, (Also check out the What's new after you get an understanding of SW) then within 2 weeks you should be able to work with SW with some efficiency. But if you use another CAD while you use SW, then it will take you longer

GUARANTEED

. You have to want to learn SW, or be forced too, before you will pick it up.

Didn't mean anything mean by my reply about being a master. Just wanted to clarify what you meant by "Master" and what it means to me as "Master"

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[Takami826]

I was an AutoCAD user since release 9 (dos days) and last year I was given solidworks on my system and was told to figure it out.

I did the tutorials and was making simple parts right away. I would highly highly recommend the tutorials and then follow up with a formal class or two. Our community college was far cheaper than the people who sold my company solidworks.

Meanwhile, our company is trying to get everyone migrated over from AutoCAD to Solidworks and they are all hardcore AutoCAD users. You truly do have to 'free your mind' and it is a very difficult thing for a lot of people. I can say this because it's become my job to 'help' and try to explain how to design in SW.

AutoCAD logic is not Solidworks logic and if you try to design with AutoCAD logic, it just won't happen. You really do have to forget everything AutoCAD has taught you.

Another thing that is important is to remember that design intent and relationships are key. In Autocad you could kind of slap things together so they look good, but if you don't establish relationships and define your geometry in Solidworks, one minor change will give you a nightmare. Relationships and fully defining your geometries also ensures accuracy far better than it ever could in AutoCAD.

 

[kroth]

Takami826

Hi:

Thanks for your comment -- you are absolutely right -- it's the logic that trips up a lot of people in their learning effort, and that is what got me on the first attempt. Autocad logic embeds itself in your brain, and needs a good dose of SW logic to turn off or at least make less insistent. SW just doesn't work until your mind lets go of Autocad logic, and at least has a hint of SW logic to build on.

All the training I saw was bottom up - like explaining an elephant piecemiel to someone who has never seen one -1 hour on a foot, 2 hours on an ear -- etc. This type of training might work on competent rote learners, but doesn't do much to defeat Autocad logic and replace it with SW logic. Perhaps professional trainers should figure out a top down approach to teach SW.

In my effort to make progress, my first success was reading in Tickoo's book the section on "Reference Geometries" - 55 pages that made instant sense, and I still remember and can use easily on first try. Maybe this is the place to start -- maybe this is a crack in AC logic, like the camel's nose under the tent, that will allow SW logic a foothold. What is the next topic that naturally and easily builds more permanent structure on this foothold ???.

Regards

Kurt

 

[Heckler]

I believe we have come full circle back to what Tick originally said

Just forget AutoCAD all together and free you mind!"

Until this happens all the AutoCAD user can ever hope to make is pretty little useless stick figures



Best Regards,

Heckler

 

[MadMango]

To [blue]Kroth[/blue]: I read your post in the Inventor thread, but didn't want to discuss SolidWorks there.

In front end product development, where one is faced with the need to do something new (for example to cut a lawn by machine, before the day of lawn mowers as we know them), one tries to imagine various ways and means, and then explore these in overall concept, layouts, plans, specific possible components etc. This works well with pencil sketches, and for me with drawing tools like Autocad 2d. - a lot of free floating, not very specific stuff, that ultimately settles down to something that makes sense, and appears feasible.

It's very easy to design a basic layouts in SW. You can use sketches to layout the basics of your design, and use this layout sketch to define other parts as you work on the design. I design mechanisms all day, and I find this a rather easy approach.

I use one sketch to represent one "system" in my design, until I get the basics all worked out. I then create simple shaped models to represent these sketch lines. As the design solidifies (no pun intended), I refine those basic shapes. I would turn a simple extruded shaft with two pivots into several parts to represent a threaded rod with spherical bearings on each end.

I'm probably not explaining myself that well.

My fear is that after significant effort to retool my thought process from Autocad to Solidworks, I may end up incompetent: a competent designer, however, an incompetent product development engineer. The net result after much effort will have been to replace a clumsy tool that worked, with a vastly superior tool that does not work (for me, basically as inventor/engineer).

I gave up AutoCAD 6+ years ago and have never looked back. It realy depends what field of work you are in to see the advantages (or disadvantages) that solid modeling can offer.

[green]"But what... is it good for?"[/green]
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[kroth]

Hi MadMango:

Thanks very much for your response, quoted below -- this is exactly how I do development, and this is exactly where I would want to end up in my SW effort -

"It's very easy to design a basic layouts in SW. You can use sketches to layout the basics of your design, and use this layout sketch to define other parts as you work on the design. I design mechanisms all day, and I find this a rather easy approach.

I use one sketch to represent one "system" in my design, until I get the basics all worked out. I then create simple shaped models to represent these sketch lines. As the design solidifies (no pun intended), I refine those basic shapes. I would turn a simple extruded shaft with two pivots into several parts to represent a threaded rod with spherical bearings on each end. I'm probably not explaining myself that well."

However, since I am still at the very basics of SW learning, I have absolutely no conception how this would be done in SW. Is it possible for you to let me have a SW file that illustrates this?

Thanks

Kurt

 

[PaulnKY]

here's my $0.02 worth.

kroth, you said

"I am generally concerned that Solidworks would not give me this rapid reliable insight capability (at the start of the invention/development chain), which is critical to me as an engineer, and might cripple my imaginings, make me work too hard in creating this framework"

To me this is exactly backwards, with a solid model, allparts are there in 3d with interference checking, it is much easier to see how it all fits together. Using your framing example, think of this, at the end of the design, your client comes back and wants 2x6 walls instead of 2x4 walls. Set up correctly the Solid Works model will update all the 2x4s to 2x6s and move anything that needs to be moved in just a few minutes.

 

[kroth]

Thanks for your intersecting comment.

I think I am slowly arriving at a satisfactory feeling about these concerns.

To re-focus my basic question:

How good a tool is SW as extension of the brain: does it allow the solidification and externalizing of vague, developing ideas, or does it mire the brain in its own workings (its mates, tricks and tips, icons, drop down menu's --), actually hindering the process. In many ways, a pencil in the hands of an artist is the perfect tool (as for example Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of his conceptions of various unlikely mechanical devices, such as his "helicopter").

If I had even a fraction of da Vinci's artistic and visualization talents, I would probably not touch SW or Autocad - I think I would stay with pencil and paper.

SW learning has a heavy stress on "technique of correct mates" - that is, mating specific parts specifically to each other. This is ideal at the design/manufacturing end of the process, when one is close to a final design.

At the other end, the inventing/development end, perhaps, the heavy duty focus on "mates" is the problem, since very little is known at the start, there are only vague parts and relationships, that are forever changing, and arriving or departing as one's ideas are evolving. There are few reasonable mates, and firm parts. Those that do make sense are fleeting and continuously changing.

How good is SW in allowing "continuous change and evolution", where only the "need" is known, and little else, at the start -- and the final goal is a specific assembly, with specific parts in specific mates.

Perhaps one should think in terms of a "developing assembly": a set of indefinite evolving parts, in an indefinite framework, with indefinite and evolving relationships. This set could easily evolve loose in space, or mated to co-ordinates, planes, axes, nodes etc. in an evolving framework.

In time, as this "evolving assembly" matures, if the internal workings of SW do not prevent this, this could in fact become a "final assembly" of "specific" parts, just by continuously refining parts, and massaging and refining their relationmships and mates into a firm final design.

I am starting to feel that SW just might be a good tool for this --- if it allows continuos change easily without getting itself hopelessly confused (and crashing).

 

[TheTick]

How good a tool is SW as extension of the brain: does it allow the solidification and externalizing of vague, developing ideas, or does it mire the brain in its own workings (its mates, tricks and tips, icons, drop down menu's --), actually hindering the process. In many ways, a pencil in the hands of an artist is the perfect tool (as for example Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of his conceptions of various unlikely mechanical devices, such as his "helicopter").

Personally, I don't know if I could be a designer without CAD. My penmanship and drawing ability are horrible. Yet, for some reason, I can whip out sound CAD models as fast as I can think. CAD is a wonderful tool that helps me take the images out of my mind and display them to others.

The main reason I have developed this fluency is that I have learned to embrace each tool's possibilities, not bemoan the loss of the tool it replaces. Also, I am a designer first, an operator second. "Begin with the end in mind", as the saying goes.

I leave you with a quote from Stephen King's Gunslinger series, of which I am a huge fan...

I do not aim with my hand, he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.
I do not shoot with my hand, he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.
I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart.

"An object at rest can not be stopped."

http://www.EsoxRepublic.com

 

[MElam]

I do my assemblies the way you seem to be looking to do and as others have described.

I start with a layout sketch or skeleton part (see links below for help), then insert parts. Many times my parts start out as simple boxes or cylinders and then I add detail as necessary.

These articles are from SolidWorks Express newsletter:

http://www.solidworks.com/swexpress/sept02/200209_techtip_03.cfm

http://www.solidworks.com/swexpress/july/200107_techtip_01.html

http://www.solidworks.com/swexpress/july/200107_techtip_03.html

 

[SBaugh]

Those News letters are something all the users need to get. I still learn from those News letters every time I read one of them.

REgards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
faq559-716 - SW Fora Users

 

[kroth]

Many thanks - I feel a sense of comfort settling on my concerns -- particularly on reading this newsletter (

http://www.solidworks.com/swexpress/sept02/200209_techtip_03.cfm

)(I was unaware they existed) which deals with my concerns very well.

SW is typically taught bottom up (memorize a great deal of specific detail, and trust that it builds up into competency). This was my first exposure via a recent week introductory course led by a reseller's instructor. An extremely capable and knowledgeable SW operative (also an experienced Autocadder). The heavy duty bottom up approach simply did not agree with me, and I bailed after the 4th class.

Perhaps SW should be taught top down as an alternate approach - create a conceptual framework / understanding /overview / structure, and fill in the specifics and detail and refinement - anyway, that might have worked better with me.

Bottom Up SW should be taught/offered to detail designers, apprentice designers, kids just out of high-school, the inexperienced (where correctness in details is important).

Top Down SW should be offered/taught to the experienced, the sceptical, engineers, development oriented (where correctness in concepts is important).


Thanks to all who thought about this - replied -
I appreciate it very much.

Kurt

 

[MElam]

I think the main reason top-down is not taught to beginners is because of the complex nature of the relationships. Until users understand this, it is extremely easy to paint yourself into a corner with circular references and over-defined mates and parts (although making these mistakes was my teacher).

 

[wesman33]

kroth,

Some of this thread sounds like a conversation between me and "the AutoCAD guy" who sits next to me - but you have the right attitude: Try it before you write it off!

With that said, a couple of things that seem to have helped some of our recent "converts" are:

One thing SW does well is to allow you to focus on design intent. From your earlier postings,you seem keen on top down design, so try this - don't think of them as "mates", think of them as "relationships between my parts". If part A has a tongue that slides in the groove on part B, your mechanical instincts should be telling you that the two parts are in contact, the sides are parallel, etc.

Name your features (and your mates) well.

Think about "how would I make this?" If your machinist will start with a piece of plate, your design should start with a rectangular slab. If a groove will be turned on an lathe, draw a profile and rotate. Paradoxically, this focus on the "real" will help with this Zen-like "freeing of your mind".

You've already done the hard part - after you've found this forum, you'll never have any unanswered questions!!!

Good luck!

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

after you've found this forum, you'll never have any unanswered questions!!!

Great ... so what is the meaning of life?

 

[kroth]

Hi Again:

Mates and relationships seem to be a sticking point in SW. As MElan mentioned earlier, this may be the reason SW is tought bottom up.

One comment I might make:

SBaugh in faq 559-871 states

"In my opinion and in my experience Planes have been the best way to make mates inside a SW Assembly. When using a plane you don’t have the fear of losing a face ID. If your not aware of what a Face Id is I’ll try and explain it. SW uses what they call “Face ID’s” or “Edge ID’s” These ID’s are what control mates, colors, in-contexted relationships, Sketch relations, etc -- "

In SW Newsletter, specific to top down design: (

http://www.solidworks.com/swexpress/july/200107_techtip_01.html)

"One method that can be used to capture the design intent for an assembly is a reference feature skeleton. A reference feature skeleton is a framework comprised of simple, robust features (that is, planes and axes) used to define mating surfaces, axes of rotation, common reference features. These simple features can be created and named according to their functional use. "

and:
" Planes and axes are simple, robust features that can be defined with few parent/child relationships. The ability to use a simple feature means the design intent can be clearly delineated. A reference feature skeleton can be constructed within a part or assembly. A part feature skeleton can be used to define planes or axes that will be used by more than one feature.

For major functional surfaces within a part, a well-named plane can be used by many features while creating only one parent relation to the plane. This is a better practice than using a part face for the same function.

Reference feature skeletons can also be used to simplify complex models or assemblies. When the major functional surfaces are defined, unnecessary features or components can be suppressed to help minimize the information required to rebuild the part or assembly "


---- It would seem that top down might be a better way to use and learn SW.

Sould one routinely populate ones design with reference features, and then mate parts to these features (instead of to each other)??? -- or does thus have other drawbacks, such as creating a confusing clutter of planes --????

 

[rockguy]

I use skeleton sketches in most of my designs. I then build ny assembly using the top down method. I find it works very well. The sketches are great for controling and mating parts. It provides a central location to control many aspects of the design.

 

[SBaugh]

kroth,

If your inexperienced to SW don't learn Top-down yet.

It's kind of like this. You can't learn CAD, if you don't understand how to draw it on the board first.

Or as in bowling (Like I told my girlfriends son the other day) He wants me to teach him how to throw a Curve ball. He's 7 years old and I just got him off the bumpers. At the least... He must learn how to control the ball from going into the gutter, before I can teach to throw a Curve ball.

You should not learn and advanced function in SW until you learn how tocontrl, use, and maintain your normal assemblies without In-contexted relationships throwing a monkey wrench into the mix.

If you go with In-contexting - you be out more then you already are when you start having circular relationships, Errors, Part errors, etc...

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
faq559-716 - SW Fora Users

 

[kroth]

Hi SBaugh:

You are absolutely right, and in fact I am seriously working on the nuts and bolts of SW, however, with the caviat that I will (hope to) eventually use these nuts and bolts in a top down fashion.

This thread, in my mind deals more with strategy and technique - so, hopefully once the nuts and bolts of SW are under control (which I assume are not solidly bound to design method), I would wish to apply these in a top down technique or startegy (most of the time) - and from this thread I have learned that SW does indeed lend itself to top down design (thankfully)- SW might not be worth the effort for me, that is - if this were not the case.


Regards