SolidWorks:Heard! - Episode 326 - Large Assembly Tools

Large Assembly Tools:

This podcast covers a variety of tools built into SolidWorks to help alleviate performance issues related to large assembly modeling.  With 64 bit now being the dominate OS among SolidWorks users, the complexity and scope of designs growing. Topics covered:

- AssemblyXpert

- Open Methods

- Lightweight (options and capabilities)

- Quickview / Selective Open

- Large Assembly Mode

- SpeedPak

As our hardware and software grow in capacity, assemblies have grown and continued to push the envelope of performance.  Although the adoption of 64 bit Windows 7 is growing and now has become the majority, there are still a number of measures we can take in the software to help balance performance vs. capability.

Lightweight mode has been around for a long time and among users it seems to be one of those necessary tools but requires a number of user interventions when certain operations need to be performed, like edits. Over the past years Lightweight mode added to the list of functions that can be done while in this "performance sensitive" mode.

Now with tools like Selective Open and SpeedPak, there are a number of tools now to address these performance hits and can be toggled on/off easily depending on the operations required.  My hope is to see all these tools come together in a similar way as Windows memory management has.  Imagine SolidWorks knows what resources are available and always allows me to operate at the optimum performance for whatever operation needed to be performed.  This appears to be the direction SolidWorks will be taking with it's SolidWorks V6 solution, as most cloud based tools do on the server end. ~Lou

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