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A review of the long-awaited update to SolidWorks Corp.'s flagship product and how it stacks up against its key competitors.
Almost a year in the making, SolidWorks 2003 is one of the most anticipated updates to this popular MCAD software to date. As with any SolidWorks release, this one is loaded with scores of new features, but for this review I am going to focus on only the most critical enhancements and compare them to similar tools found in competing products such as Autodesk Inventor and Solid Edge from EDS PLM Solutions. So let's start off by first discussing a big change in SolidWorks 2003-the ability to create multiple bodies within a single Part file.
Multi-body Parts
In past versions of SolidWorks, if a disjoint sketch, such as the one seen in Figure la were created, upon performing a 3D operation such as an extrusion, SolidWorks would produce an error message. Now, as shown in Figure 1b, the result is a multi-body part.
By itself, this wouldn't be too useful; however, there are some nice options and features that work hand-in-hand with this new multibody capability. For starters, when making a sketch three-dimensional, a new option comes up that allows users to select the contours that they want to affect, as shown in Figure 2. This saves steps because now a single sketch is more flexible, that is, it can be reused in different ways.
The new Contour option also makes intersecting sketch entities no longer invalid for 3D operations. For example, if two rectangles were overlapping, any one or all three of the resulting contours could he selected and extruded, revolved, and so on.
In addition, SolidWorks users can now take advantage of two new Boolean operations-Combine and Split-in order to create more complex models from the multibody parts. The former tool does the adding, subtracting, and intersection of bodies while the latter operation allows for separate multiple bodies to be created in the part file and/or created as separate files. These bodies are not parametric, but they can be independently edited with certain tools such as scale and move.
All these new, related functions are not a replacement for the assembly tools, just a way to make the building...