New in SolidWorks 2013 – Enhanced Section View Interface – Adding offsets

What’s New in SolidWorks 2013: Section View Assist Part 2 – Shortcutting cutting line creation

Section View Assist automatically comes up when you start the Section View tool without preselecting a sketch.  Section View Assist allows you to create very complex section views very quickly.  It also allows you to make the simplist section views faster than before, without the need to draw sketches on your drawing view.   Included in the new tool is the ability to shortcut the creation of simple section views even more!

If you do not use more complex section view cutting lines very often, you can by-pass the Section View Pop-up by checking the “Auto-start section view” setting.  This will allow you to place the cutting line and then immediately place your section view.  The setting is sticky, so you wouldn’t need to choose it again.   If many cases, you can create your section views with just two quick mouse clicks.

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What’s New in SolidWorks 2013: Section View Assist – Part 1

SolidWorks 2012 and prior had two separate tools to create section views in drawings, Section View and Aligned Section View.  Although these were very capable tools, there was two different workflows to create cutting lines for section views based on which tool was chosen.  The two types of section views where not interchangeable.  Both used sketches to determine the path of the section view cutting line.   However, both tools produced very different results with the same sketch layout.

SolidWorks 2013 unifies these separate types of section views, along with half section views, into one tool called Section View.  This new tool has expanded capabilities, being able to handle a wider range of section view types and scenarios.  For example, you can now add arc offsets to your cutting line and get the correct display in the resulting section view.  There are many other improvements as well.

When the new Section View tool is launched (without preselecting a sketch), a new user interface appears, called Section View Assist.  Section View Assist allows you to rapidly generate cutting lines for your section views without needing to draw sketch entities.  Four options for standard section views are immediately available: Vertical, Horizonal, Auxiliary and Aligned.  Each of these can be  previewed on any standard drawing view.  Use Tab and Shift-Tab to cycle through the preview choices.  Relations to geometry are automatically identified during the preview.

Vertical cutting line:

Horizontal cutting line:

Auxiliary cutting line:

Aligned (bent) cutting line:

To accept the cutting line placement and geometry relations, simply LMB click when the preview is at the desired location (more clicks will be required to place Auxiliary and Aligned cutting lines).  The Section View Assist will then set the preview of the cutting line on the drawing view with any applicable geometry relations.  Additionally, the Section View Pop-up appears nearby.

To accept the cutting line location, RMB click OK or select OK button from the Section View Pop-up.  Then, just place the section view on the drawing sheet.  In many cases, you can add you section view as easy as 1 – 2 – 3 clicks without the need to draw sketches.

Note: you can still create a sketch and preselect it prior to starting the Section View tool.  This will allow you to bypass Section View Assist and use the same workflow as in SolidWorks 2012 to create a section view.

SolidWorks Help is being updated frequently based on user feedback

SolidWorks Help is being updated on a regular basis.  The primary source for the frequent updates is user feedback through the Feedback on this topic link that you can find at the top of each help topic of the Web Help.  SolidWorks appreciates user this feedback.  For more information on some recent updates, please check out this posting on the SolidWorks Forums:

Recent Enhancements to SolidWorks 2013 SP2 Help in Response to User Feedback

What’s New in SolidWorks 2013: New capabilities of Exploded Views

Multiple exploded views per configuration

In assemblies and multibody parts, the ability to create multiple exploded views for each configuration is now available.  As before, each exploded view appears under the specific configuration in the Feature Tree at the Configurations tab.  Now, multiple exploded views can appear as a list under each configuration .  This means you now longer need that the old workflow of having to maintain separate configurations for separate exploded views, even when the configurations are otherwise identical.

This functionality is also now supported in eDrawings.

Copying exploded views

Additional power has been added to exploded views and configurations where you can use normal windows Copy-and-Paste functions (CTRL-C/CTRL-V) to copy and paste exploded views between configurations!  To do this, highlight an exploded view in one configuration and hit CTRL-C.  Go to another configuration in the same assembly, and hit CTRL-V. Easy!