It's that time of year again -- when many of the major CAD tools release their annual or bi-annual upgrades.
That was the case earlier this week with the latest release of SolidWorks by parent company Dassault Systemes. In much the same vein as last year's release, the new SolidWorks 2013 corals more than 200 customer-driven improvements into the release, which fall into the following, big-picture buckets: more powerful design tools, faster model creation, improved performance, and enhanced collaboration. These were pretty much the same categories as last year's SolidWorks release, with the exception that 2012's focus on new product development was swapped out for new design tool additions in the 2013 release.
Click on the image below to see seven examples of SolidWorks' updated capabilities.
SolidWorks 2013's PhotoView 360 rendering engine has been enhanced to support more textural appearances on objects, and a new network rendering capability allows for faster rendering of images by networking multiple computers together to share the computational load. (Source: SolidWorks)
In that vein, the SolidWorks team added two major new modules. The first is SolidWorks Plastics, an analysis capability for analyzing what happens with custom parts before going through the expense of making prototypes or investing in tooling. The module, which has two flavors -- one geared at the part designer and the other at the mold designer -- is really all about helping designers make sure the custom plastic parts are optimal before building tooling, without having to create multiple physical prototypes along the way, Rich Allen, SolidWorks' director of product management, said in an interview.
"The pain point around plastics is that these models can cost a lot of money," he told us. "You create a mold right the first time and the process goes faster because you don't have to do as many prototypes, and you're saving a lot of time and money."
The second new module addition is SolidWorks Electrical, with both 2D and 3D capabilities, aimed at what Allen said is a huge part of the company's user base (60 percent was the number he cited) looking for electrical design capabilities as part of their go-to CAD offering. Given the trends around electromechanical products and more complete system design, having the ability to do both in one tool without having to rekey data, import data between siloed systems, or deal with Excel spreadsheet is a huge time saver, Allen said, and a top requested function among SolidWorks users.
Beyond the two additional modules, SolidWorks 2013 boasts several other highlight-able features. In the area of faster model creation, the update has conics capabilities as a more streamlined way of creating organic shapes. For a performance boost, 2013 features a network rendering capability for the PhotoView 360 rendering application that shares the computational load between multiple computers. New simulation sub-modeling and incremental meshing capabilities kick in for doing precise simulation analysis on specific areas of large and complex models.
Greg: Plastics design seems to be a big issue that many of the CAD vendors are starting to tackle in earnest (not just SolidWorks). Plastics simulation was a big part of Autodesk's recent cloud-based simulation suite as well.
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That makes sense, Beth. With all of the collaboration and file sharing involved, it seems there would have to be a move toward interoperability. While that doesn't necessarily suggest a move to open source, it probably does mean the major players would need to make their files easy to convert.
I would say proprietary CAD systems still dominate, but increasingly they've had to embrace open standards because the reality is there is no homogeneous use of CAD--most companies have several systems in play internally and have to deal with partners and suppliers all of which use an array of CAD systems. At the same time, there are a number of interesting open source CAD efforts, LibreCAD, FreeCAD, and Archimedes, to name a few.
Beth, with all these new developments in CAD, is it still proprietary systems competing with proprietary systems? Or, has open source become a factor at all?
TJ: You've really hit on a major issue the CAD guys have been struggling with, particularly in the modern day of software where apps and cloud-based, pay-as-you-go models are gaining traction in other parts of the business outside of engineering. I believe SolidWorks showed off a cloud version of SolidWorks at its big user conference last year and its parent company Dassault has been pretty aggressive with overhauling its architecture to support a cloud-based architecture. My guess is pretty soon you'll see the option to purchase SolidWorks in a more utility-based pricing model--not as a replacement, but as an alternative to the more traditional, albeit costly, annual license fee purchasing strategy.
Beth, I used Solidworks at my previous job, and liked it very much. The addition of an electrical package means it is possible I could use it for my new job.
Cost is going to be an issue; Solidworks is comparable to other packages. It's still expensive. I wouldn't mind so much if it was a typical capital purchase. But it's not, is it? We don't purchase software, we rent the privilege of using it, and if we wish to continue using it we pay an annual license.
Charles, Solidworks has had a basic FEA package built into it since at least 2005. The version I used could only calculate on a single part (not an assembly).
I'm really looking forward to some of the new SolidWorks 2013 capabilities. I'm especially interested in the Plastics module which will help our team analyze moldflow during the design (and before we send to the supplier).
The capabilities going into these new systems are amazing, Beth. I'm curious about the materials analysis part of this: Does this have structural analysis capabilities?
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