SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1 (Jan 21) A Commanding Presence

One of the stars that kept popping up all over the place at SWW8 was the famous/infamous Matt Lombard.  As mentioned, I attended his Hybrid Modeling breakout session.  Before showing up, I didn’t know what to expect.  First of all, his breakout session was in one of the large rooms, that could seat possibly  500 people.  I don’t really know.  I know it was pretty full in comparison to other sessions this year.  I’m not going to go into too much detail about the session’s agenda since I covered that already.  Instead, there are other items of note. 

In a moment of surreal quality, right in the middle of an audience member asking him a question, Matt recognizes him and declares something along the line, “I’ve been looking all over for you! I have it right here.”  He then proceeds to find a copy of his SolidWorks book and brings it down to his faithful attendee.  At the same time, I see a hand reach out from the front row or so grasping some amount of dollar bills.  Matt makes the exchange, declaring some self-derogatory statement and continues the presentation. 

This photo here is of Matt lording over the model he is about to render subservient to his will.

Lord Lombard commanding his model

Two other moments came up where he recognized others in the audience (if I remember right, SolidWorks perennials of some sort)  and declared his complete amazement that they where there listening to little ol’ him.  Just because you write a highly regarded book about SolidWorks doesn’t preclude you from being in awe of others.

The session was informative and entertaining in the shear unexpected natural phenomenon known as Matt Lombard. 

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1 (Jan 21) Breakouts and Such

Though the breakfasts at SWW8 left a lot to be desired, I have to say the food serviced at the lunches was enjoyable.  One of the things that SWW8 organizers tried to do was set up tables for lunch with particular themes, called Birds of a Feather.  Basically, each day, the cafeteria was laid out with tables in particular areas being labelled with particular interests.  One day the tables were labelled based on SolidWorks software related interests.  Another day, the cafeteria was divided into industry genre.  The last day was divided into regions of the U.S. and the World.  Honestly, it didn’t make a dang bit of difference to me.  Two out of the three days, I sat pretty randomly anyway.  The one day I did sit where I was supposed didn’t turn out all that interesting to me (no offense to the people at the table with me).

 On my first day of SWW8, my breakout sessions where actually not directly SolidWorks related.  The first breakout session I attended covered Advanced Project Management Concepts.  I choose this session originally because other available sessions at the same slot were either topics I already know well enough, or were not related to me at all.  I didn’t expect much from this particular session.  I was surprised.  I’m glad I was in attendance.  The session was kinda an eye opener covering topics in project management including criticisms of and improvement upon the critical path method, the root causes for scheduling issues, bad behavior that I have always thought was good behavior (multi-tasking), Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time available for its completion), 3 Minute Egg Rule (sarcastically: it’s not quality if its finish before time is up), and the CYA factor.  The session then addressed the true nature of projects and discussed methods to use in order to plan projects more effectively.  Out of all my breakout sessions, this is the one where I took the most notes (and that wasn’t because it was the first one I attended).

I then attended the breakout session labelled Clarifying Software Tools and Regulatory Compliance.  I work in a heavily regulated industry, and have been grappling with the question of how to treat SolidWorks within that environment.  Is SolidWorks and related applications subject to validation requirements.  The answer I found here was no!  SolidWorks and its related applications are authoring tools.  Drawings can be document of record in the Device History File, but they can be so in the form of formats like PDF or TIFF.  My company already treats the PDFs of drawings as the controlled document, so this fits well within our processes without the risk of having cumbersome activities limit the use of SolidWorks in some artificial way.

Hybrid Modeling Solids and Surfaces was the next breakout session I attended on Monday.  This session was conducted by Matt Lombard.  This session revolved around the idea of using good practices to create models that employed both surfacing and solid modelling.  He discussed the sequential method where one starts out creating a part as surface model and then becomes a solid model.  This is accomplished by grouping all of the surface features at the start of the Feature Manager, and grouping the solid features at the bottom.  This method produces a well organized tree, but may be difficult to maintain if certain features which blur the boundaries of surface and solid modelling are used.  The alternative is simultaneous hybrid modelling, that has a combined use of solids and surfaces throughout the Feature Manager tree.  He also went into details about many of the surface and solid modelling tools.  Seeing many of the SolidWorks tools demonstrated was enough to make this time well spent.  I briefly met Matt at the end.  We previously have had some correspondences regarding a particular topic du jour: HM, CF, RC1, RC2, & RC3.

I went to my final session of the day on a whim.  I had intended on going to a session that covered the topic of PDMWorks and API or something.  However, it was across the building, and this session was just down the hall.  Welcome to the 9th Annual SolidWorks User Group Network Summit Meeting.  The attendees of these meeting turns out to be a who’s who in the SolidWorks universe.  Many of us Blog Squad members where there, but the focus of the group was the SWUGN and its leadership.  I was first introduced to this level of activity by a personal invite from Richard Doyle to attend a SWUGN Regional Technical Summit in 2007.  Before that, I had been to a couple of SWUG meetings over the years and that’s about it.  The one thing that strikes me as quirky and yet endearing is Richard Doyle’s pronunciation of the letters S-W-U-G-N and how they just roll off his tongue.  It’s not swu-jen, or swoo-jen, or swu-gun, or even swug-in.  He pronounces the g as in begin, not as a j like in giant.  He easily utters swu-gin in a way that may take other English speakers years to master.  

 The session was very informative as to the progress and goals for the SWUGN in 2007 and throughout 2008.  As the day come to a close, I headed off to recoop in preparation for the long day to come.

SolidWorks World 2008 Animation

SolidWorks World 2008 Inspired to Design VEXplorer Video from Solidsmack on Vimeo.

This was the introduction animation (linked above) used each day at the start of the General Session.  In a presentation with Jeff Ray, VEXplorer was introduced.  This is a Student Design Kit where kids of ages 10 and up can build their own robot, and design other variations with the Student Edition of SolidWorks, which is now provided for free with the robot kit.  Honestly, I wasn’t that impressed with the robot itself.  I saw the live demonstration of the robot in the Partners Pavilion.  It would be fun for one or two uses for one or two times.  I don’t see what would keep the average kid coming back to it.  However, it is a start in the right direction to help inspire kids to explore design at a younger age.  It is certainly a good way to expose kids to SolidWorks as the preferred software for accomplishing engineering tasks.

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1: The General Session

Each day of SolidWorks World kicks off with a General Session.  Each day had surprises.  Of course, to experience all of this requires getting up early enough in the morning.  The crowd quickly filled up the area outside of the General Session auditorium of the San Diego Convention Center.  Even on the first day, I developed quite the talent of surfing through the crowds to get closer to the doors into the General Session auditorium to get a good seat when the door swung open.

 Outside the General Session, NorthCrowd outside of General Session, South

It was standing room only in the General Session.  Even with thousands of seats, hundreds of people where left standing.  Estimates ranged over 4700 attendees.

General Session, facing the stage 1 General Session, facing stage 2

General Session, facing doors

On Monday, the surprise guest was Danny Forster, whose trademark is expressing his deep fear of heights.  He is the host of Built it Bigger on Discovery Channel, and a prominent architect and engineer.  Despite the fact that he did give a rather interesting and engaging presentation that discussed everything from home design to the marriage of architecture and engineering that went into the University of Phoenix Stadium, I am surprised he didn’t get booed off of the stage early on as he made it a point to state that he used AutoCAD to design one of his buildings.  SolidWorks users must be a more forgiving bunch than I would’ve thought.  I know he did it on purpose; the rat.

KIVA Systems made an interesting presentation where they showed off a robotic system that replaces the need to send people into a factory to retrieve items.  Another robot highlighted at the conference in the SolidWorks intro animation was of a robot being designed and built.  It turned out that this robot is a built-it-yourself kit and being sold for the ages 10 and up crowd.  Included with the robot is SolidWorks Student Edition!  Talk about hooking the kids young!  More on this later on.

There was another surprise on Monday; one that was both fascinating and a bit scary at the same time. See, there’s this guy named Theo Jansen.  He is a kinetic sculptor that builds “Beach Beasts”, based on skeleton like designs that are powered by nothing more than the wind.  He’s designed the creatures (as he also called them) to become so sophisticated, they are able to mechanically sense their environment, and mechanically respond to it.  For example, if one of these creatures walks up to the ocean’s edge, it knows to start going the other way to avoid the water.  It does this without the use of any electronics at all.  It’s all plastic tubing.  During his presentation, Mr. Jansen appeared to be one of those people that successively balances the line between genius and insanity.  However, off stage was a different story.  I talked to some of the facilities contractors for SolidWorks World 2008 later that night at one of the local bars.  They where the crew that helped Mr. Jansen assembly one of the creatures for an on-stage demonstration.  Those fellows couldn’t wait to tell me that they think he had crossed well into the realm of insanity, often talking about his creations as though they where actual pets; and that he wanted his creatures to survive long after he passed on.  He was definately the most provocative presenter during the Monday session.  The video about him is too long to post here, so check out this YouTube link.

At the end of the General Session, everyone filed out into convention center’s maze of hallways, filtering into the many different Breakout sessions, Hands-on sessions and the Partners Pavilion.

SWW8 Pre-Day (Jan 20, 2008) Part II

Sunday was beautiful, as I mentioned before.

On route to the convension centerGaslamp Quarter

But did I get to enjoy it?  No.  Being the dedicated SolidWorks user (geek) that I am, I attended workshops (called Focus Groups) about different functions of the software.  The convention center wasn’t all that crowded on the Pre-Day.

Entering Focus Group meetings

Did we change the world in the Focus Groups?  Only time will tell.  Later in the evening, the Partners Pavilion was opened to us early attendees as a reception.  I got to leisurely stroll around.  This would be my only chance to do this, as my schedule for the next three days was booked with hella events and things.  One of the displays in the Partners Pavilion that struck my fancy at the sheer irony was this item, labelled as a competitive class luxery off-road racing truck.  If that isn’t a whole series of oxymorons, I don’t know what is…but hey, I wouldn’t mind having one of these in my garage!  (And yes, luxury appeared to be purposefully spelt with an e.)

competitive class luxery off-road racing truck

This truck was completely laid out in 3D before production began.  It is called the Luxery Prerunner and made by Stewart’s Raceworks, Inc.  Another cool vehicle getting a lot of attention was an Orange County Choppers creation made for SolidWorks World 2005.

Orange County Choppers' SolidWorks Chopper

I took this picture at just the right angle to catch the star sheen gleaming off the chopper’s chrome, and just in time to avoid yet another person trying to take of shoot of themself sitting on the seat pretending to ride it.

I didn’t go out that evening too late, as I wanted to be well rested for the next day’s activities.

SWW8 Pre-Day (Jan 20, 2008)

Flying in on the afternoon of Saturday, I was greeted by beautiful San Diego weather.  It was the sort of picture perfect day that one tends to take for granted in San Diego.  Sunday was just a beautiful, but I didn’t know that from personal experience.  See, I was at the first day of SolidWorks World 2008, buried deep in the heart of the San Diego Convention Center.  In the morning, I attended two Focus Group sessions, the Design Checker Focus Group and the Surface Model Functionality Focus Group.

Now, I know what you are thinking, “Who cares about Design Checker, and in fact, who even uses it?”  Well, this is likely part of the reason SolidWorks held a focus group on the topic.  Participation was a little light.  When invited to the focus groups, participants were told that the group size would be limited to 12 people.  The group for Design Checker hit 9 people, and that was including the two SolidWorks employees there were putting it on.  Points discovered in the meeting basically revolved around the fact that Design Checker is not nearly as flexible as people need.  For example, there’s no way to create custom checks for type of items not included within the software.

The Surface Model Functionality Focus Group was brimming at the edges with over 15 attendees.  Most of the comments during his session revolved around increased functionality and ease of use for the various surfacing features.  SolidWorks staff was on hand to both take the suggestions and immediately respond when someone mentioned a bug-like issue.

After that, I attempted to take the CWSP test.  I got hung up on an apparent error in the test that turned out to be an acceptable part of the test.  I will need to leave some feedback about the issue since it has the distinct appearance of being unintentional.  If it is intentional, it’s an issue that should be evaluated at least, since it is distracting to say the least.  It is frustrating to see a flaw in the model only to find out I got the problem correct (after wasting half my time trying to resolve the issue).

After that, I attended the Attendees Reception in the main Exhibitors hall.  I found a few familiar faces among the vendors’ booths and fellow attendees.  I didn’t walk out of the Reception with nearly as much swag as I would’ve expected.  That is prolly for the best since I forgot my backpack.  Oh yeah, let me tell you about this backpack.  This is the best swag I’ve ever received.  It’s like a million pockets.  However, there is one area where SWW8 was woefully lacking.  They didn’t provide pens!  I can honestly say I have never been to a technical event where pens where not provided, either as swag or just as courtesy.  But despite this frustrating point, the overall experience was great.