SolidWorks Labs Expands Its Technology Sandbox

SolidWorks Labs has added a bunch of new CAD “toys” to its technology sandbox, giving 3-D CAD users an opportunity to try out four new experimental applications available at no charge.

The newly overhauled SolidWorks Labs site features:

–Treehouse, aimed at design teams that think from the top down. The tool lets users create and customize a graphical representation of a conceptual assembly prior to beginning actual design work. By dragging and dropping icons, users can name components and add custom properties before creating a single document. The top-level assembly can then be brought into any PDM system, and components can be assigned to the appropriate users.

–Tagger, leverages tags to help CAD users improve communications with colleagues. The add-in lets users open an assembly, part or drawing and see a list of tags used in that document, and any feature can be associated with a number of tags.

–Presentation Studio, a tool for creating interactive PDF files to share information with non-CAD users. 3-D models embedded in the PDF files have full 3-D interaction, including pan, zoom and rotate, and the files can be read by any Adobe Acrobat Reader software, version 8 or above.

–The Collada Export add-in, a tool for exporting solid models in an industry standard 3-D object and motion format for use in programs like Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008.