The industry's top engineers, designers, and additive manufacturing experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your 3D designs and engineering skills.
Assembly scans are useful in several ways. They are typically more detailed and complete than single scans and can include features that would not be visible or scannable without disassembly. They are useful for viewing internal components and can even be used for diagnosing motion systems. A … [Read more...] about How to Master Assembly Scanning in Artec Studio
As the year wraps up, many of us start to think about New Year's resolutions. Of course, we all want to exercise more and lose weight – but what about work goals? Here are eight of my 2020 resolutions to become a better designer and engineer. 1) Fix Your File Management Disaster For years I’ve … [Read more...] about 8 New Year’s Resolutions to Becoming a Better Engineer
Working with SOLIDWORKS and Excel in the same space is very common. But what if you could use Excel tables inside SOLIDWORKS to control configurations? Or to suppress features, change dimensions and materials? Then you wouldn't have to worry about affecting other configurations. Now, there are … [Read more...] about How to Utilize Design Tables in SOLIDWORKS
Recently, I ran into a scenario where I had to design some custom-sized gears and found a creative way to make a beveled gear that I thought I should share. There are equations to calculate specifications of the bevel like the cone angles of the gears, tooth, face width and cone distances. I wanted … [Read more...] about Designing Bevel Gears in SOLIDWORKS Using Sketch Blocks and Lofts
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a CAD model is worth a million! Unless, of course, your CAD model looks like this: This model, while structurally sound and well-designed, appears rather anemic and certainly isn’t going to elicit any strong emotional response from your viewers. … [Read more...] about 4 Simple Ways to Enhance Your SOLIDWORKS Models
Transparency settings in SOLIDWORKS are great for clarifying the inner details of a design and gaining access to obscured areas of a part or assembly. Occasionally, however, transparency can become difficult to manage. This is especially true for face transparency, as it is not tracked in the … [Read more...] about How to Remove Transparency From Faces of a SOLIDWORKS Part
Have you ever wondered what the difference between a Weld Bead and a Weld Fillet is in SOLIDWORKS? Both methods allow the user to define welds inside of a 3D part. The decision between the two generally comes up when you're using the Weldments tool and needing to add a new weld around a joint. So … [Read more...] about Choosing Between a Weld Bead and Weld Fillet in SOLIDWORKS
Creating a Section View in a SOLIDWORKS drawing is typically a straightforward process. Generally, you start by creating a drawing view, use the Section View command from the View Layout tab and place the resulting section. While easy enough to create, Section Views created in drawings do have some … [Read more...] about How to Explore Section Views and Drawings in SOLIDWORKS
