Navigate to Solidworks > Help

Ravi Solanki

Application Engineer

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and

How to Use Copy settings Wizard?  

Step 1: Type Copy setting Wizard in your Windows Start search and open the app.

Step 2:  Click Save settings and hit Next

Step 3: Choose where and what you want to save. Click finish.

Now, to Restore the settings saved earlier,

Make sure all of your Solidworks applications are closed.

Step 1 Open Copy settings Wizard tool.

Step 2:  Browse the previously saved settings file.

Step 3: select what settings you would like to copy over.  Finish

*****Note****

• Copy settings wizard is not recommended to use for copying settings from one version of Solidworks to other. 
• If there was any corruption in the user settings of the SOLIDWORKS registry, then it will copy that corruption to the settings files. 
• It is best to save copy of your settings to new file at different point in time, so that you can always come back to your previous settings just in case your registry gets corrupted 

Nikesh Shrestha

Applications Engineer Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

]]> https://centralinnovation.com/technical-resources/tips-and-tricks/introduction-to-copy-setting-wizard/feed/ 0 https://centralinnovation.com/technical-resources/tips-and-tricks/upgrading-solidworks-dont-leave-solidworks-electrical-behind-copy-3/ https://centralinnovation.com/technical-resources/tips-and-tricks/upgrading-solidworks-dont-leave-solidworks-electrical-behind-copy-3/#respond Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:27:02 +0000 https://centralinnovation.com/technical-resources/tips-and-tricks/upgrading-solidworks-dont-leave-solidworks-electrical-behind-copy-3/ Hi guys,

Is this the time of year to upgrade SolidWorks to the new release?

Well, I am not going to go through the upgrading process because it has been covered in many and several blogs.

This blog is all about the Solidworks Electrical Schematic upgrade process. Solidworks Electrical Schematic may be a part of your full Solidworks installation or a standalone installation, it may also be installed as a server/client in your working environment.

So, what do you need to do?

Before upgrading Solidworks Electrical

You need to back up your work. This process is quite easy and straightforward. It is also your fail-safe guarantee in case something goes wrong.

From the Solidworks Electrical Schematic, File menu go to Archive Environment.

On the Welcome Screen click next

The Selection Screen is where you can choose the field you want to back up. It is recommended to back up your projects and any customised libraries.

That’s it. Depending on the size of your projects and libraries the archiving feature will work to compress everything into a single file. Make sure to keep this file in a safe and accessible location.

Before you start the upgrade process, please note:

SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2021 and later require Cumulative Update 4 or higher when using SQL Server 2019. For more information on Cumulative Updates, visit the Microsoft Support page and search for the Knowledge Base article 4548597.

During upgrading Solidworks

Just as per the normal upgrade process, follow the on-screen instruction till the Summary Screen.

On the Electrical Options Setting Screen, go to the SQL Server section and make sure the following is set:

• Use an existing SQL Server database
• Connect using SQL Authentication
• Login = sa
• Password= SQLpwd4ew (if not changed during initial installation)

Finally, follow the on-screen instructions to complete the upgrade process.

I hope you enjoy your new Solidworks upgrades.

Keep watching this space for more tips and tricks.

Amgad Yacoub

Technical Solutions Consultant

Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

Lofted Bends in SOLIDWORKS are a tool that has been in the software for years and a tool that I think a lot of time gets over looked for the abilities of what it can do for a user.

When we look at the Property Manager for Lofted Bends we are presented with quite a few options. Typically, when I want to know more about the feature that I am working on and what it can do for me I hit the? mark in the upper right. In the case of Lofted Bends, it takes me to a general help page for Lofted Bends telling us the basics of how to build a part with Lofted Bends.

https://help.solidworks.com/2022/English/SolidWorks/sldworks/HIDD_SM_LOFTED_BEND.htm

To find out more about Lofted Bends you need to dig a little deeper into help and do a search for Bent Lofted Bends, unfortunately at this current time I am only able to find information about Formed Lofted bends in the SOLIDWORKS Training Manual for Sheet Metal.

Lofted Bend Requirements

There are some characteristics of Lofted Bends that are unique from a standard Loft or Sheet Metal Part and they are:

• Cannot be mirrored.
• Only open contours may be used as sketch profiles.
• The gaps in the profiles should be aligned for flat pattern accuracy.
• No more than two sketch profiles are allowed.
• Use of guide curves is not supported.
• Use of center line curves is not supported.
• K-factor applies to flat patterns of lofted bends only if the lofted bends are created from sketches that meet specific conditions.

Bent Lofted Bends

You can use Bent Lofted Bends to create physical bends, rather than formed geometry and approximated bend lines in a flat pattern. Bent Lofted Bends form a realistic transition between two profiles to facilitate instructions for press brake manufacturing.

With Bent Lofted Bends you have four different options as to how the bend regions are defined be selecting one of the Faceting Options, then specifying the values for the chosen option in the Facet Value field.

Faceting Options

You can also control the individual bend regions by selecting the pink spheres in the preview.

The last option is for Refer to endpoint to specify whether the created bends refer to a sharp corner in the profile or whether the sharp corner is replaced with adjacent bends to form an approximated arc in the corner.

Refer to endpoint = Checked            Refer to endpoint = Cleared

The rest of the options in the property manager are the same as any other Sheet Metal part.

The resulting Flat Pattern looks like what you see below (Bend Lines Sketch selected to show detail).

Formed Lofted Bends

Formed Lofted Bends have a rolled or drawn look to the bend regions instead of being separated by bends and flats like in Bent Lofted Bends.

To create a Formed Lofted Bends, the profiles must meet an additional requirement:

• Profile cannot include sharp corners.

You can see with the Property Manager and the resulting preview that we have fewer options and a Message about the difference between a Bent and Formed Lofted Bend.

The resulting Flat Pattern looks like what you see below, note there are no Bend Lines like in the Bent Lofted Bends example.

Jeeno Chandrasekaran

Applications Engineer Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

New South Wales – Head office | CAD software supplier

The best solution is one tailored to your needs. Let’s discuss your options, at our New South Wales Central Innovations head office. Or call us or email us.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2022

New to SOLIDWORKS 2022 is the ability to directly export your CAD data to SOLIDWORKS Visualize with one click.

Export Simple:

Export Simple minimizes the number of parts that appear in the Visualize Scene Tree, which is basically the equivalent of your assembly tree within SOLIDWORKS. It also groups your parts by their appearances, making it easier to change the appearance on multiple parts at once.

Let’s take a look at an example of a part model:

Save as .prt format

Here, we see the Test PE 100. Let’s see what the resultant Scene Tree looks like when we export this to Visualize using the “Export Simple” tool:

All of our parts that were assigned an “Polished steel” appearance within SOLIDWORKS have been grouped together within Visualize.

Jeeno Chandrasekaran

Applications Engineer Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

New South Wales – Head office | CAD software supplier

The best solution is one tailored to your needs. Let’s discuss your options, at our New South Wales Central Innovations head office. Or call us or email us.

Figure 1: Screen Duplication Example

What is happening?

If you’re running Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, in combination with a 4k external display, the OS will attempt to automatically choose an appropriate scaling setting for the display. Often, users will want to make adjustments to those settings to fit their desired layout. To enlarge text
and other UI elements, DPI scaling is usually set globally in the Display settings found in the Windows Control Panel.

However, this can lead to blurry text and other oddities in applications that do not work well with the global scaling settings.

To resolve this issue and bring SOLIDWORKS back into the waking world, follow the steps below.

How do we fix this?

Step #1

Browse using Windows Explorer to find the SOLIDWORKS Executable file (SLDWORKS.exe).

• By default, this is located in C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS 20XX\SOLIDWORKS (where XX represents the year) or in C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS

Step #2

Step #3

Step #4

Click Change high DPI settings and then check the box labeled Override high DPI scaling behavior. Ensure that the Scaling drop-down menu is set to Application.

Step #5

Lastly, reboot your computer and then launch SOLIDWORKS. This should resolve the SOLIDWORKS display scaling issues you were seeing and return you to normal operation.

• You can run “Import Diagnostics” on non-native SOLIDWORKS models, but you cannot heal or fix any bad geometry.  Modifying (fixing) any geometry could change the face and edge identifiers.  That, in turn, would break the update capability of “3D Interconnect”.
• Not being able to run “Feature Recognition” on an imported part that was not converted to the SOLIDWORKS file format.
• A STEP or IGES file opened as an assembly in its native format will not allow individual components to be opened in a separate window.
• You can’t float the individual STEP or IGES components in the assembly.  This means adding mates will not affect how they interact with one another.

Two Ways to Fix the Issues Above

You can turn off “3D Interconnect” by selecting Tools > Options > System Options > Import and clear “Enable 3D Interconnect”.  See the screenshot below.

If you don’t want to turn off the 3D Interconnect option, there is a quicker way to change a file to the SOLIDWORKS native file format. In the Feature Manager Design Tree, right-click the inserted third-party native CAD file and click “Dissolve Feature”.  See the screenshot below.

Note:  “Dissolve Feature” is something that can’t be undone.  You would have to re-import the file with the “3D Interconnect” option re-enabled to re-establish the original link.

Some SOLIDWORKS users have also noticed better results with eliminating surface errors in components by importing the assemblies with 3D interconnect and then using “Dissolve Feature”.

Central Innovation wants to make this process easy for our customers. If you require further explanation or feel the Performance issue or other unknown error, please contact us through email – support@intercad.com.au, support@intercad.co.nz

Jeeno Chandrasekaran

Applications Engineer Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

New South Wales – Head office | CAD software supplier

The best solution is the one tailored to your needs. Let’s discuss your options, at our New South Wales Central Innovations head office. Or call us or email us.

• Web theme
• integration theme
• application theme

The Web Theme is designed to provide a true web experience with the flexibility of further customization.

To get started,  with the web theme you need to install DriveWorks live on a server machine that needs access to the group & project data, notice that you have to install the same plugin used at the DriveWorks administrator machine, once you get installed follow the steps below:

1- Load DW live, then click on themes

2- Select the web theme from the list

3- click finish

4- Click on start to get DriveWorks live up and running (DW live web page will load automatically once you hit start)

5- by clicking on the arrow underneath the open browser you will see the different web addresses that you could share with the team internally to start using DriveWorks live. 

6- DriveWorks Live is now up and running internally within your network, Locally on the DriveWorks live machine you could access the web theme using localhost address http://localhost:8020

Recommended setup:

It is highly recommended to host DriveWorks live on the IIS service to get faster load times for DriveWorks User Forms that display dynamic content (Pictures, DriveWorks 3D Files, etc.) on the Client browser.

And to run it as a service on the server means it could automatically start on the windows start-up so no need for manual login to get it up and running after each server restart.

For more details about how to install DriveWorks live on IIS follow the below link:

https://docs.driveworkspro.com/topic/ConfiguringDriveWorksLiveForIIS

Customizing web theme:

There are two types of customization you can do in the web theme

• to change the website’s appearance.
• give each page additional functionality by adding pre-loaded Modules.

Appearance:

Editing web skin using standard options:

1- Load DW website then log in using an administrator account

2- Add /setup at the end of the address bar website address where The address bar of your browser will now be http://localhost:8020/setup

3- Click on skins to see the different skin options, then apply the one you would like to use, where skin settings to change DriveWorks logos with your company logo.

For advanced skin editing customisation on live theme skin files is the only way, below help link explain what editing can be done to which files to get the look you are after

https://docs.driveworkspro.com/topic/LiveCustomize2

Functionality: (/?mode=edit)

Each section you see on the web page is a module, the login box, project select section, specification history,

you could change the setting for each module beside you could also change the layout of the modules,

There are a lot of benefits you can get out of editing modules settings,

• Allow a setup for automatic login
• Select project to automatically load
• Change the Manu layout
• Add specification details, form, and history to the layout
• Integrate DW live into external webs sites using Iframe (https://docs.driveworkspro.com/topic/IntegrationModuleLive)

For more details about the existing modules and how to edit/add them have a look at the following link:

https://docs.driveworkspro.com/topic/ModulesLive

Web theme is the perfect module for internal network use and basic customization which has a limitation that it allows one group access only, and advanced theme customization could be hard a bit, where integration theme is the recommended theme if you have more than one group, which allow extended functionality to integrate DW inside external website without iframe in additional to sending and receiving data from the web site as well, which would be much easier to customize the look of it compared to the web theme.

If you require further explanation or to learn more about the benefits of using web theme and the difference between web theme and integration theme  please contact Via email – support@intercad.com.au, support@intercad.co.nz

Ahmed Lasheen

Technical solutions consultant

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

1. Reducing size (Converting Solid-body to exterior surfaces only):

This method can be used if only exterior surfaces of the solid bodies are needed for assembly referencing and mating and the actual solid body is not of importance. This method can also help reduce the size of the step file drastically.

The procedure to convert the solid body to exterior surfaces only is as follows.

• Import the step file containing the solid body
• Save it as a SolidWorks part file with exterior surfaces only (making it a surface), then

• Open the SolidWorks part file you saved in step 2 and
• Export it again as a step file.
• You can then use 3D interconnect to import the step files and maintain a link to the step file with exterior surfaces only.

The main drawback of this method here is that if your step already contains lots of surfaces then this option in step 2 is not available. Make sure the step file contains solid bodies before importing. If the step file belongs to another CAD system, tell the supplier to send you a step file with solid bodies only, which you can then convert to exterior surfaces.

This method can also be sometimes used with other imported file types like Parasolid etc. and can also be used to simplify a SolidWorks sub-assembly or top-level assembly containing a large number of mates and references.

2. Importing Step file as graphics body:

One way is to import the step file as a graphics body. This is the fastest way to deal with imported files with almost no effect on the performance of the assembly but a major drawback of this is that it can only give you a visual representation of that imported part and no interaction with the features is possible including mate referencing.

3. Optimizing Step File in Top-Level Assembly

The method highlighted above might not always be the preferred way to import a file, especially if the users want all the features, bodies, and surfaces in the step file to be imported as it is and the features themselves are important. Therefore, in this case, the user should know how to optimize the top-level assembly performance and make sure that resources are allocated to features of interest only.

Adjusting Image Quality Settings:

When importing step files with extremely large sizes and features, it is always important to check and adjust image quality settings. Try reducing these settings if the assembly performance is extremely slow. These settings can help in getting the balance between performance and speed.

Tweaking display settings of individual parts or assemblies to shaded or hidden lines only and hiding parts you are not using can also speed things a little bit up.

Using Mated or Graphics SpeedPak of Sub-Assemblies:

The other thing that significantly optimizes the top-assembly performance is using SpeedPak. This is an extremely handy tool especially, when only portions of the imported geometry are required for mating or references, and the remaining geometry is purely for graphical purposes. Users can consider using SpeedPak to create ultralight representations of their geometry.

As only sub-assemblies in SolidWorks can be SpeedPaked therefore, to SpeedPak an imported step file the procedure below can be followed

• Import the step file,
• Save the imported step file as SolidWorks part file.
• Insert the new part file created in step 2 into its own assembly,
• Then save the new assembly file.
• Open the newly created sub-assembly in the top-level assembly to access SpeedPak options.

Now there are two ways to SpeedPak a sub-assembly as shown below

Within the top-level assembly file, go to the Configuration Manager tab, right-click the configuration, and then click Add SpeedPak. The user is then prompted with the features in the sub-assemblies to be SpeedPaked.

Another way is to do all the mating first and then in the feature manager tree right-click and select SpeedPak options and then click mated SpeedPak.

S. Jalal Farid

Applications Engineer Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

New South Wales – Head office | CAD software supplier

The best solution is one tailored to your needs. Let’s discuss your options, at our New South Wales Central Innovations head office. Or call us or email us.

File size can be an important factor for parts especially if you are running over a network or loading files from the web. When you have large assemblies made up of many different files then reducing the file size on disk can have a big impact on performance.

The following example SOLIDWORKS part is comprised of four simple features, saved to disk it is 1.3 MB.

SOLIDWORKS Part Performance Evaluation

Actually the load time for the part from a local drive is pretty quick but when checking the performance evaluation of the part from Tools > Evaluate > Performance Evaluation you can see that the Circular Pattern feature requires over 99% of the rebuild time and is likely the reason for the part’s file size being over 1 MB:

To reduce the file size there are various options available, these include modifying the display properties but more importantly suppressing performance intensive features. But how will changing the state of the file effect the size on disk?

Time for a very unscientific experiment with a few variables, I’m going to display the SOLIDWORKS Part Performance results first and provide an overview what I did to the part, here are the results, with a description of the file options applied:

As you can see from the table of results saving a simplified version of the part with the Circular Pattern feature suppressed produced the smallest file size on disk. And combining that version with the other visual properties would likely further reduce the file size.

Simplified Parts

We know that simplifying parts has the best results for performance,Using the simplified version of the part in a large assembly would likely be fine as you probably wouldn’t need to show the cut-outs in the context of the entire assembly.

An interesting result from the test was the fact that when the part was saved with a simplified configuration (a version containing the suppressed pattern feature) it still had a significantly larger file size than the part that had the feature suppressed without a configuration. Evidently SOLIDWORKS still has to keep track of the default configuration with the Unsuppressed feature and that accounted for the larger file size.

Also the version of the file that was rolled back above the circular pattern in the feature tree was not as small a file size as the simplified configuration version. Having a simplified configuration is likely the best option, and allows you to load the part in a simplified state, which is especially beneficial when loading a large assembly.

Modifying the Visual Properties

Note that changing the display properties under Tools > Options > Document Properties > Image Quality certainly helped but didn’t have a significant result on file size of the part. And using Display States with plain appearances didn’t make a lot of difference to the file size either.

Summary and further learning

As I mentioned earlier this was not a very scientific test. But having a simplified configuration of your parts is always good practice. If you are working with individual parts that are quite large, then suppressing the features that are responsible for the majority of rebuild time (without breaking the model) will help you to work faster.

There are a lot of other options available for part performance when working with large assemblies which you can discover in our SOLIDWORKS Large Assembly and Drawing training

Central Innovation wants to make this process easy for our customers. If you require further explanation or feel the Performance issue or other unknown error, please contact Via email – support@intercad.com.au, support@intercad.co.nz

Jeeno Chandrasekaran

Applications Engineer Central Innovation

At Central Innovation, we can provide all – or part – of the solution. Including SOLIDWORKS, ARCHICAD, and many more industry-leading tools.

It’s something we’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Our commitment to customer service is second to none: we help you get the best out of your technology.

For a truly unique solution to your unique challenges, please contact us. Or read about some of the great services and solutions we offer.

New South Wales – Head office | CAD software supplier

The best solution is the one tailored to your needs. Let’s discuss your options, at our New South Wales Central Innovations head office. Or call us or email us.