Many of us have been arms wide open to the new section view assist tool that was released with SolidWorks 2013 but for those who have yet to make the move, this blog is for you.  I have seen it a few times now, a customer calls in and is finding that their jogged section view is stretched when this is not the view they intended.  Generally, the option for creating a “foreshortened section view” or “an aligned section view” comes up when selecting a jogged section line for creation of the section view.  This message can and is often times dismissed leaving the user to default to the last selection.  One option is to clear this message from the System Options under messages/errors/warnings; the second option is the topic of this blog.

 

Let’s take a look at an example of a created section view, I have sketched in my line, inferenced my geometry and selected the section view.  I was prompted the above notice in which I wanted to create an aligned section view for purposes of this post.

The section view was created and as you can see an aligned section view was generated from my selected sketch line.

Now this may not be the desired section view, so how can I go about creating a foreshortened section view where the projection is normal to the cutting line?  Simple!  If you go back to the option of the two, you will see in the description that “Construction lines are excluded from the view.”

I can simply edit the sketched line that I used to create the initial aligned view, but change the vertical sketched line to construction lines.

After this has been done, simply exit the sketch and your section view will update to a foreshortened section view.

The other day, I received a file from a customer that had an odd display issue. It appeared to have cosmetic threads showing as solid lines in one drawing, but not in the other. It turned out that one drawing’s annotations had been put on a layer that was using a solid line font. To change this, SolidWorks 2013 now allows you to right click on the cosmetic line in the drawing and select Change Layer in the menu that shows.

In previous versions, you had to turn on the Layer tool bar to make this change. Now, all you have to do is right click the annotation and select Change Layer.

You will get a floating layer tool bar to make the change to the layer applied to the selected annotation.

Nice little addition that was not shown in the “What’s New for SolidWorks 2013.”

SolidWorks 2013 adds new functionality when it comes to processing those renders you always dreamed of. New for 2013 is the capability to network render. In short, this give you the capability to utilize the processing power of up to ten computers from your network to complete a render job. This exciting new feature cuts your rendering time down to an efficient and manageable level. So say good bye to waiting for your machines core to do the job on their own.  I’m going to walk you through how to set it up and before you know it, you will own your very own “render farm”!

In order to get this to work you need accomplish two simple tasks. First, ensure that you have SolidWorks 2013 Professional or Premium with the PhotoView 360 add-in turned on. Second, for all of your machine that will be used in the farm, they will need to be branded with the PhotoView 360 Network Render Client. This utility will allow your machine to access their processing power during the render stage. This will effect their performance but chances are, they aren’t using those extra cores anyway.

To install the render client on the farm machines, simply insert your 2013 SolidWorks DVD or use the downloaded SolidWorks install files from the customer portal and start the installation manager.

When you start the install process you will NOT be installing SolidWorks on the farm machines, just the client. You will click through to the product selection window and only select the PhotoView 360 Network Render Client to install.

 

Continue the install process until complete then repeat on all machines that you wish to add to your farm. Once complete, the farm machines will have a program called PhotoView 360 Network Render Client in the start menu. It will look like this:

This client will have to be up and running on the desired farm machines in order to be used by the machine running SolidWorks 2013. Once you start the client on the farm machines, an interface will open. You have to “enter client mode” for the machine to be active in your farm. This is done by selecting “Enter Client Mode Now” as indicated below. You can also set up a schedule as to when the farm machines are available and when they are not.

Once you enter client mode, you will see a dialog box in front of the client letting you know that it is waiting for a job. This will remain up until you exit client mode. It will also change once the machine receives the task of rendering.

 

Now that have your render farm awaiting your command, all you have left is to set up your machine to call out for help from the farm. Navigate to your PhotoView 360 menu and select options. From here, you can adjust your PhotoView Network Render options.

 

 

Now you are ready to render your heart out. Activate your final render inside of SolidWorks. You will see the normal render window with orange colored squares for each of your cores and blue squares for each of the farms cores.  Check out this screen capture from a our small render farm. The 8 orange are my cores while the blue ones are the farms cores. Meanwhile the farm machines will show rendering data in the client.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a PhotoView 360 render farm. Happy Rendering!

SolidWorks Motion – Trace path and convert to SolidWorks Curve, a hidden gem.

The other week I took my daughter to the science museum, my favorite educational distraction.  While we were exploring the exhibits we came across a pendulum drawing machine (Harmonograph) that makes cool pictures.  We whipped out a few before moving onto the Bernouli Ball (I’ll have to get back to that as that’s something SolidWorks Flow Simulation can do).  Here’s a picture just like the drawings we made now hanging on my refrigerator.

The next week I was discussing SolidWorks motion with a prospect and how it allows you to simulate complex motions and the Harmonograph came into my head (can you imagine a more complex motion than the above image?).  So I made a first example, really simple, two pendulums, probably took all of 5 mins to create.

 

In motion I added gravity and clicked run, although I left out the details that connect the pendulums to the drawing pen I was able to see the drawing was working by tracing a point on one pendulum with respect to the other pendulum.  See how the curve moves with the pendulum on the left while tracing the path of the pendulum on the right.

After determining the system was working as expected (crawl, walk, run) I added a simple drawing mechanism.  To reduce the modeling effort I replaced the wires linking the pendulum to the drawing mechanism with 2 simple equations.  Now the system was quite recognizable, even to my 3 year old.

From there I had to try another version of the drawing machine I’ve seen with rotation (loved my spiralgraph so much I wore the teeth off). 

Of course there’s a point beyond Motion’s ability to simulate these really cool drawing machines.  I’ve created a few cams over the years using this functionality.  Basically what we do is simulate the desired linear motion, then trace that with respect to some rotating object and SolidWorks motion with automatically draw out the required cam for your system.  From there you can make that trace become a curve in SolidWorks, simply extrude, rinse and repeat.  So if you’ve ever needed a complex path created by the motion of objects in your design SolidWorks Motion is the tool for you.

Tim Newton

Symmetry Solutions Inc

In 2013 SolidWorks you can now automatically deploy an admin image from the option editor. There is now a link to do this in the editor and you can set this to deploy to any or all machines on the same MS Active Directory Domain.

In this image you can see that I have added machines on the domain and selected them to deploy. You also have options of when to do the install Now or at a specific time later.

Then in the client options you can set it to either install or uninstall and if it is to uninstall is it going to be a custom one. This will give you more options of what to remove from the machine during the uninstall like registry settings or data folders. You can also select to have the computer automatically reboot after the install/uninstall is complete.

Additionally there is a place to add the admin log in so the installs are performed using this. Once you have this all set to run you then get a status feed back on the install so you can see if any of them fail. This is also a silent deployment method so there is no indication on the client machine this is happening like in a manual admin image deployment.

This and more will be covered in an upcoming webinar about installing SolidWorks 2013.