How do you recreate an identical sketch on another face/plane? Convert edges is fine if you want to project a sketch to a parallel face or plane, but what if the face in question is not parallel? You could copy a sketch and then mess around with linking all the dimensions, but what if you want the sketch in a different orientation? Enter the Derived Sketch command.
The Derived Sketch is a cool tool; it creates a copy of a sketch that is tied back to the original. After deriving a …

The 2009 SolidWorks User Group Network (SWUGN) Technical Summits are about to get underway!  The first one finds SolidWorks returning to sunny Orlando, FL, the site of the recent SolidWorks World 2009 conference, on April 28.
If you didn’t get to attend SolidWorks World this year, the Technical Summits are the next best thing!  I liken it to a massive user group meeting.
The structure is similar to one day at SolidWorks World, but on a smaller scale; and they are bringing it to you!  There will be representatives of local user groups, VAR’s, and SolidWorks in …

Publicly unveiled in late March, OnLive bills itself as “the world’s highest performance Games on Demand service.”  They purportedly have the technology to stream games, including the latest high-end game titles (such as Crysis Warhead and BioShock) to broadband users.  (For a full list of supported games, click here.)
The service will run through the OnLive Microconsole and play on a user’s TV, or can be run directly on a Mac or PC.  The founder, Steve Perlman (of WebTV and Apple’s QuickTime), says, “The first patents expire in 2022, so …

Back in early December, I posted an article on Display States and Steve Calvert commented about controlling the visibility of new components:

Brian, I use display states and love them except for the fact that when I add a component I have to go back and remove (hide) it from the already created display states. Do you know a way to add a component and only have it show in certain display states?
Steve Calvert
Originally posted as a comment by Steve_Calvert on CADFanatic using Disqus.

And I responded:

Steve,
I’m unsure of previous versions, but …

At this year’s SolidWorks World 2009 conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. William Doll, Director of SolidWorks Labs.
After talking with Bill there and later through email concerning another article, I wished to learn a little more about SolidWorks Labs and share it with you. Bill graciously agreed to an email interview, and I learned a lot. I hope you find it informative!
CADFanatic: Hi Bill, it was great meeting you in Orlando at SolidWorks World 2009. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview.
Bill Doll: Hi Brian, it was a pleasure …

Do you know about the “secret” Forced Rebuild command?  I say secret, because there is no menu item for it; it is only accessed by hitting CTRL-Q.  It does everything Rebuild does, and much more!
A Forced Rebuild rebuilds the entire feature tree from the beginning, unlike the regular Rebuild command, which only rebuilds what has changed since the last Rebuild.
Well, John Setzer of Graphics/Systems has a post on their blog, SOLIDNotes, regarding the differences between these two Rebuild commands.  He goes into a lot of detail on how the Rebuild commands walk through …

Have you moved to SolidWorks 2009 yet?  If you haven’t, and need a good reason to do so, then continue reading!

SolidWorks touts the maximum time savings of moving from SolidWorks 2008 to SolidWorks 2009 as 65%.  Is it true?
Well, I have not done any quantitative testing, but I can say that it definitely feels much faster to me; especially in larger assemblies and more complicated parts.  However, a user from our user group did a not-so-scientific test with a representative set of production files, and the results were amazing!
THE TEST
The …

The proceedings from the SolidWorks World 2009 International User Conference and Exposition in Orlando, Florida, are now live! And things are a little different this year… Based on feedback from previous World’s, SolidWorks has opened up access to a broader audience and captured more media data to share.
CUSTOMER PORTAL USERS REJOICE!
In year’s past, attendees used a unique log-in to access the presentations and files from the conference. This year, SolidWorks is making the proceedings site available to all users with a Customer Portal account. If you do not already have a …