Name: Built to Make - Part 2: SOLIDWORKS Design Strategies for Real-World Manufacturing
Uploaded: 2026-05-20T20:30:24.052Z
Duration: 55 min 48 s
Description: Built to Make - Part 2: SOLIDWORKS Design Strategies for Real-World Manufacturing

Transcript for "Built to Make - Part 2: SOLIDWORKS Design Strategies for Real-World Manufacturing": what's up, Jeff? Hey, Dave. How are you? Good, man. Happy, Wednesday. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So good to have Gigi on here doing all the hard work setting us setting us up, getting us ready to go for today. I I see we still got some folks coming in. We appreciate everybody being here today. Today, we will be covering a lot of of content. So please, as we're going along, just pop your questions in the chat or the q and a. We'd love to hear questions and feedback as we're going along. We've got quite a quite a bit of stuff, so, appreciate everybody being here. If you want, over in the chat, log in over there or just post where you're from. It's always kinda fun just to see where everybody's coming in from, and, we'll get going from there. So, Jeff, we'll go ahead. Alright. So I'm Jeff Linderman. This is our second part of a two part webinar. Hopefully, you guys saw us last week when we did the webinar, but, I concentrate on the injection molding simulation tools and mold tools within SolidWorks. Also do some stuff with DELMIA plant layout and factory flow. Been with GoEngineer for ten years. I really enjoy presenting with David. We have a great time, so we always come up with some fun content. He tends to, like to play with AI a lot. So, he always creates our intro videos. Oh, yeah. Jeff the Jedi master up in the Jedi Temple. It is May, so May 4 be with everyone. My name is David Kersley, senior AE out of, Austin, Texas, SOLIDWORKS elite certified, like Jeff, on many teams and do a lot of things. And it's always a pleasure to get to work with Jeff. Love working with Jeff. We always have a good time, fun trips, good times, lots of laughs. So we'll go one more slide there, Jeff, and we'll get into our agenda, and then we'll get going. But, the first session, we covered injection molding, sheet metal, and metal casting. Hopefully, if you you attended. If you didn't get to attend, but look for the email where you can go back and watch that web link. Today, we're gonna cover CNC or CAM, and we're gonna be covering a turned part. We'll also be talking, Jeff will dive, into additive manufacturing, and then we'll wrap this up with AI. It's the hot topic. Everybody wants to know, you know, what's gonna happen. Is AI coming for our jobs? You know, is it the rise in the machines? But, we look at it a little differently. And, hopefully, after today's presentation, you will have learned something on CAM, additive manufacturing, and feel a little more comfortable with CAM. So, with that said, let's get going. Alright. So, CNC or CAM, what we're gonna do in this session is we'll walk through several SOLIDWORKS best practices that can help streamline Alright. So, CNC or CAM, what we're gonna do in this session is we'll walk through several SOLIDWORKS best practices that can help streamline your design workflow, improve your model quality, and reduce manufacturing issues downstream. So what we'll do is we'll take a closer look at Alright. So, CNC or CAM, what we're gonna do in this session is we'll walk through several SOLIDWORKS best practices that can help streamline your design workflow, improve your model quality, and reduce manufacturing issues downstream. So what we'll do is we'll take a closer look at a multi turned part example and show how SOLIDWORKS CAM can be used to efficiently program or validate our machining operations directly inside the SOLIDWORKS environment. Now whether you're focused on design or manufacturing or both, the goal of today is to share practical techniques that you can start applying immediately. Now this comes directly from the Go engineer website. If you go to goengineer.com, guide to buying, cam, there's the link up at the top. The big question is, what am I, what what tools and what machines do I have? What is the correct, cam package that I need? Right? You know, cam standard is in SolidWorks standard, pro and premium. Cam professional is a purchased license, and CamWorks is also, separately purchased. It's a professional level add in for SolidWorks that provides, advanced cam capabilities. So before we get in there, what type of machines are you guys using? If you're in here in the chat in your, a machine shop or, have some CNCs or some lathes, go ahead and pop it in the chat. Let's see what you guys are using. And, are you using a two and a half axis, or are you using a six axis? Just pop it in the chat and just so, you can show off a little bit. Now when we're making, parts, we'll talk about prismatic or milling from a billet, a a block here, not a billet, but a block here to start with. You know, the key things to consider and there's a lot. Okay? Number one is, like, always designed to the finished part for sure. Right? That's what we do. And I'll talk about the configurations and how that might come in. Jeff talked a little bit about it last time about using configurations for the cast parts. He had a cast part versus the machined part, and they were different. And we'll do that today just as a refresher. You know, what are the critical features? You know, again, what how am I gonna locate those critical features, and how am I gonna call that out to the machine shop if I'm using outsourced, services there? Things to consider, like reference mating parts. You know? Again, look at the tolerances and how that part is dimensioned, and that's gonna help you design and and put the tolerances on your part, especially if you're starting from zero. Right? And we're gonna design for minimum setups. Right? Create a clear flat primary datum face. Right? Again, we'll opt out for using largest possible tools. Again, these are just some key considerations, and we wanna avoid overly deep pocket. Now we're gonna limit the pocket, the the depth in which we're cutting to three to four times the tool diameter. This is gonna prevent tool deflection and vibration. And deflection would be the bit kind of angling out. Imagine it that. The vibration would happen if it starts to chatter against the wall, and then all of a sudden, you're gonna get some pretty crude, chewed up corners there. Some other things to consider, again, with part deflection is we wanna avoid really thin walls. Okay? They'll tend to vibrate. Okay? And that's gonna be a problem for us. The other thing we have to consider is and we don't know maybe always do this is we have to think about, you know, as designers and engineers, how the part's gonna be made. Well, we know it's gonna be milled, but can I actually get the cutter in there? Can I get the tool in there? What about undercuts or pockets? And we'll talk about that here in just a second. And the orientation, you know, keep as many features on a possible one plane, you know, group things together. We're gonna, show you a little bit of that here in just a minute. And oftentimes, we will start with a block or what we call a subtractive process. The good the been really big benefit to me that I see on it is really cost effectiveness. Prototypes, low volume, quantities. You know, maybe I'm in the golf industry, and I only need two or three putters right now for prototyping and testing with my tour players. That's better than me going through and spending thousands upon thousands of dollars setting up, custom molds. Right? So I might only have, you know, 1,500 into three or four parts, whereas I have 7 or 8,000 invested in molds. And if I have to change, then we're changing molds, and that can get even more expensive. So early on, we might wanna think about using, milling the first couple prototypes. But when we talk about milling, one of the things that we have to set up and I'm not gonna cover every type of cutter or end mill. We'd be here for for weeks on end. Okay? So I'll just cover a couple. But a lot of times what happens in the CAM software is that, a lot of tools can be used in a myriad of ways. Take for instance just just this end mill here. Right? Or a drill bit. Right? I can use it for drilling, obviously, and I can use it for cutting grooves or slots or spotting or even chamfering. Right? So I can use one tool in multiple operations. And the good news is the CAM software is gonna recognize that. So let's take a look at how that might work. So I've got a drill bit and that guy's coming in here and he's cutting. And this looks good until I go to this top view, but what's going on in this pocket? So as designers, just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do something. Right? I can put a fill it of 3.2318375 here. That doesn't really make any sense. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. A thing to consider when we get to these corner pockets is make sure that the radius that you're using is larger than the radius of the cutting tool. And when we say that, over here, there's there's a couple things, and these come straight from the Internet and the machinist handbook and the engineering handbook. Right? And it talks about the fillet radius to depth. And and we wanna aim for a fillet radius, that's at least one sixth of the pack the depth of the pocket. Okay. Great. A tool size rule. Ensure that the corner radius is slightly larger than the radius of the tool. Example, if I've got a 12 millimeter radius in the pocket, I'm wanna use a seven millimeter cutting tool. This allows the tool to roll through the corner as opposed to and this will reduce binding in that corner. Okay? I saw this one in the machinist handbook. It says design internal features like a pockets or slots with a radius of at least 1.3 times the milling tool radius. It's you know, internal corners, they're impossible. Right? Just like what we saw. And use common tools, like a one millimeter or two millimeter or a quarter or a half. And, again, just because you can put a fillet on something of 3.23 whatever, doesn't mean that it's the most practical operation. That's machine time and that's cost. So we wanna keep all those things under consideration. We also got undercutting mills, and this is kinda interesting. I might use a ball nose or I might use some type of utter undercutting tool for deburring or slaughtering slotting or even contouring. Right? And let's take a look. So we got this box and, whoever designed it put a little cutout over here on the left side. But how am I gonna make it? Again, just because I can do something in SolidWorks doesn't mean it's practical. Right? So there's my cutting tool. I can cut the top and the bottom, but what about this area in the red rectangle? How am I gonna get all that material? I've gotta start thinking about how to rotate it and machine it from different axis. Same thing here. I'm gonna do a a three plane, cut section here. And when I do and I move this cutter up into the corner, well, guess what? What's going on in this corner? I still gotta get rid of all that material. So those are the things that we have to consider as designers and engineers. Double angle shank cutters. You may have seen these before, and I'm just gonna quickly go through these. These are great for doing, like, chamfering or putting threads and things like that on our our parts. Flat bottom drills. The advantage to these is that, being flat, they can prevent walking on irregular surfaces. I'm not gonna sit here and say that it'll it's perfect and it'll do it every single time, but it's it's a tool that, machinists will use to prevent that walking. And flat bottom counterbores. Right? So we we call out counterbores in hole wizard all the time. Right? And we think about, oh, I'm just gonna put this counterbore on there. And we don't often think about the tool and and the operation. So that's what we wanna do by calling out and and get just get you some awareness of some of these tools and and how what the operations they might use. So another big factor is here is low hole location near edges. I see this quite a bit. You know, you can use your g d and t in positioning, but really what we wanna think about here and and if you look at your engineering handbook and your machinist handbook, we wanna be careful when we put a a hole right up against the corner. Now in that bottom left image, you can see I've got a hole. Yeah. It fit. But if I have any load on that part, I can almost guarantee it's gonna fail. Right? There is a rule that says, hey. Whatever the diameter of the bore is that I'm boring through the plate or or milling into the plate, I'm gonna offset that one and a half to two times. Now what I will often do on that bottom left image, you'll see a a light gray line. And what I've done there is I'll often just put a circle twice the diameter, and I'll make it tangent and tangent, and this will help me locate where I want that hole to go. Okay? The other thing to keep in mind when we're milling stuff is, again, the rule I you hear me say this a lot. Just because I can doesn't mean I should. Right? I can design anything, but I also have to be able to work on it. And if I can't work on it, I I've missed the whole point. So make sure that when you're doing that, you're thinking about, hey. Someone's gotta get a socket on here. We've all worked on a car or a robot or something, and it's darn near impossible to get the thing together or apart. So think about how you would work on it. Okay? And give yourselves and and whoever might be working on it some room. Now when we talk about CAM, a couple of things you see here and this comes directly from the the, SolidWorks, CAM books here. They they're gonna name the features, rectangular corner slot or a multi step hold, whatever that is. So we want you to become familiar with these, names. And and if you take the, GoEngineer online cam class, these will all be called out for you. So the workflow that we're gonna use. Well, we gotta get a part to our CNC machine, and we're gonna model a great part. Okay? No problem. We've all done that. Number two, what's our machine environment, and what machine are we using? Are we using a six axis, a two and a half axis? And and we'll set that up. We'll define the coordinate system, and we can either define it by a certain position or a model feature or an edge or something like that, and we'll go over that. Then we'll get into the stock manager. Right? Most of us don't really think about it, so we'll take a machinist approach when we design our part here in just a little bit. And think about, I got stock, so I gotta a billet, and I gotta machine my part from that billet. So how would we do that? What type of cam specific, system options are there for us? And we'll cover that for you. And what about interactive feature recognition? I I want the system, to recognize these features and maybe automatically create my tool paths and operation plan. So we'll generate an operation plan. We'll generate a tool path. Right? And then from there, we'll verify and validate just like we would do in SolidWorks. We would use FEA to validate our bracket or whatever. Right? Here, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna use the tools to simulate the tool path, And then we'll create the post process. We're gonna be looking at a machine set up similar to this where we got a spindle and there's a center line of the spindle. I've got some material on here. There's my part. It's sitting on here and I'm gonna be using a subtractive process. In other words, I'm gonna be cutting away the material from a piece of stock. Now, drawing information. This is what my drawing looked like originally, and I'm reverse engineering this part, so I gotta go get it made. I can't find the original part, and I just have this old drawing. Okay? So let's take a look at our part. Now when I probably approach this, I can approach this in one of two ways. I can do a potter's wheel approach. And a potter's wheel approach means I come in, I use a center line, I offset the sketch because I want a hole through the center. Right? This is what my sketch looks like, and I'm gonna use these dimensions exactly how they are laid out on my original drawing. Now when I come over here, I'll just use my s key and I'll say revolve. I'll add that to my shortcut manager if I don't see it. And I'll pick the centerline axis and I'll revolve my part. And I can take this and now go get this and machined. And it's done all in one step. And this is one approach. Nothing wrong with it. I'll achieve the same results. What I might also wanna do is come over here and set up a stock template. Okay? And I can use global variables to set things like the length and the width. Okay. Okay. And I can also create sensors just like we did with our sheet metal parts. Maybe I wanna use dimensions, not the bounding box. Right? Because I don't have a bounding box here. So I'll just go ahead and say it's greater than this and it's greater than that. I can also set sensors for mass, you know, or whatever I want to set up here. Now if I wanted to make a new one and I had I knew I was gonna use a bigger piece of stock, I'll just come in and change my global variables. Say okay. Now once everything is set up, okay, I'll have to go fix this other sensor here. Cool. We'll update and edit the sensor. I'll come over here and let's say let's make it 2.5. And now my sensor isn't kicked off. And again, file and we'll make our template. So again, file, save as new to this PC. I'll just pick on the the the typo I want. I'll hit okay, and we'll move forward. So now there's my round stock, and I'll say it's two by 2.25. Now the nice part about this is, again, I can save it, and I'm saving time and I'm being consistent with my team. So now every time everybody opens up a part, we're gonna take the machinist approach where we're gonna start with a billet of material, and we're gonna machine down off of that billet. Okay? So that looks pretty good. So now I'm gonna take the machinist approach to cutting away the material. So I'm gonna start with the billet, and I'm thinking about the machinist. One operation, two operation, three operations to remove material. And I'll probably do two configurations. One is just the stock, and one is the finished milled part. And I'm gonna show you why because I may wanna position alternate, views over on my drawing. Okay? And this is gonna help me think about things like this one eighth, dimension here. I'm gonna, eventually move my part back because I'm gonna face off that material. Now here, all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a revolve cut, a little different than what I did before. So in the previous one, I just did a revolve. Everything was good. Here, I'm gonna do a flip side to cut revolve. Okay? And I'm basically flipping out everything that's cut away from the outside of my sketch once I revolve it, and there's my part. Pretty nice, clean, and easy. Okay. I'm still not done with the part because I haven't put the center bore in there. So I gotta go bore that out. Right? So I'm gonna turn this part around. I'm gonna use hole wizard and I'm gonna position the hole and there's my half inch hole. So I started with this big piece of stock and I just revolved it down and cut away the stock. Pretty simple, pretty easy, straightforward. Now we've designed the parts, so that's step one. Let's see what happens when we get this over into cam. If I wanted to do z up operation, I could, and that's where I could set it right there in the in the view window. K? Now in in my drawing, I'm gonna add a datum feature. Okay? So the machine says, okay. This back edge is datum a. Now I wanna make sure that I've got cylindricity to my part. So I'll pick this edge. I'll come over here, and I'll say, okay. I want to maintain perfect cylindrical shape. I'll put a tolerance on it, and I'll say done. And that's nice. What if I wanna do, the two fair the faces here, this face, I want it to be parallel to datum a, and I want it to be only a few thousands of difference. They have gotta be pretty flat to each other or parallel. So I'll say five thou. And if I click through these buttons, guess what? I'm looking for the datum. Guess what? It's right here at the bottom. Just pick on it. It'll say datum a, and guess what? I've gotten I'm telling the part that it's nice and flat on both ends, parallel to each other, and I've also got cylindricity. Now how do I add the, machine stock to this view? It's an alternate view. I'll go grab one of my different configurations. Okay. And there it goes. And I can dimension off of those dash lines. I can say that's an eighth or a quarter. Okay? So, nice little way to get that back on the drawing. Now what about in cam? So I'm gonna come over here to tools. I'm gonna go to my add ins, and I'm gonna turn cam on. SOLIDWORKS CAM, I'm gonna say okay. Now I'm running cam pro. So I got SOLIDWORKS CAM. First thing we're gonna do, step two, we're gonna define our machine. Right? I'll go grab a turret, and I'll say select. Now those tools that I talked about earlier, they might be right here in my tool crib. I can add, remove, whatever. Once I set up the tool crib for that machine, I'll select it. My post processor, what machine are you using? Are you using two axis, axis, a four axis? If I was doing prismatic milling, what am I doing here? Right? In this case, these are all the turning machines, if I wanna post it. If there was any additional setup or fixturing, setup, I would set it up here. So once I do that, I also go set my use the coordinate system for the machine. I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna say, well, am I using the coordinate system based on an entity of my part? And notice if I picked the edge, the coordinate system moved. Okay. Cool. I can also come over here and I can adjust it, whether I use it and flip it on the x or the y or the z. But how do I wanna flip it? Right? So I'll say in relation to the front flame, if I pick this, I can kinda reverse the direction. We've kinda done something similar when we reversed directions of a boss extrude. Right? So I'll go back to where we were set up on part. Next thing we have to do is go to our stock manager. And that's what you kinda see here in the gold around our part. Now over here on the left, I can set my material, and I've got different ways to start to set this stock up. The good news is when I set this part up, I started with a round billet, and I wanna use some of those parameters here when I start to set up the strategy. And I can start to play around with this stock size. If I increase these guess what? If I increase this to two, guess what? That is the same stock size that I used over when I started out as the machinist approach over in SolidWorks. And now I can start to look at how my part is sitting and milled away. Well, one thing I might wanna consider is I gotta have a little material off the front face here, and I gotta position my part so that it's just a little bit off that front edge. Right? Because I gotta machine off that front face to make sure that it's parallel to within five thou of datum a. So I'll just keep coming in here and setting these up. So So let's set this to 1.5, and that's gonna add a little bit of stock to the backside and move my park to where I want. Right? Everything looks good. I'm happy. But, again, this face is up here. So let's come down here and let's do an offset parameter. Remember I had that one eight, that point one two five. So I'm just gonna come in here and set the point one two five. Alright. Now it's gonna move my part back and that looks a lot like what I had when I started out with my original part in SolidWorks, doesn't it? Alright. Next, we're just gonna hit extractable machinable features. And what it's gonna do is go ahead and expand out another feature tree over here, and I'm gonna have some additional features like a cam operations tree. I got a cam feature tree, and I've also got the cam tool tree. These are the tools that were used to create the part. So I'm gonna operate run a generate operation plan, and this tells me how it's gonna be created. And I'm gonna run the tool path, generate the tool paths, and everything looks pretty good. Okay? I don't see any, undefined air, issues or or operations. They would appear in a dark blue. So this looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy here. Alright. Let's go to the next step. Let's go over here and let's simulate the tool path and the changes. Well, there's my part. You can see the spindle. And let's run simulate tool path. And let's see what happens here. Now over on the left, I'm gonna tell it to pause on collision. Okay? So I'll pick this one. And you I'm gonna slide this up so it runs fast. So I'll say okay. There's a little slider here, but guess what? There's a collision. So I'm trying to make this part, and I ran right into my my tool ran right into my my spindle here, and I I gotta figure this out. What's gonna happen here? So how do I fix this? It's actually relatively simple. Just like if we would edit a feature, we're just gonna edit the definition. And guess what? When I did my original stock, didn't I have a bunch of extra material over here? Well, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move this guy back, and I'm gonna say move him back 1.5. And if you think about it, I had 1.5 inches of material on my raw stock when I started this over at my SolidWorks part. So now I'm thinking about, as a machinist, how this part's gonna be held with the extra material, and then maybe I cut another part off that material or do something else with it. But now when I run my cam operations, my simulate, my tool path, guess what? It runs, it runs, and it's done. And we're all good. So, again, we can either use the potter's wheel approach or we can use this approach. Either one will work, and, hopefully, you saw something cool there. Thanks, Dave. That was great. I'm going to talk about additive manufacturing technologies and also give some tips on design for three d printing or for additive manufacturing and a use case for additive manufacturing. The first technology is FFF or fused filament fabrication. You may have heard of FDM before, fused deposition modeling. It's the same technology. It just depends on what printing company that, your printers come from as to what they call it. It is the most widely used technology. Our material is extruded from a small nozzle and deposited along tool paths layer by layer as we're going through. So the polymer is melted, and we're basically following a CNC path depositing down the layers. There are supports that get created from the slicer. These get removed by breaking away or dissolving in a water bath solution. So support has to be there to support a wall. If if your wall is a horizontal wall, there's nothing underneath it, then we need to add support material. The next is PolyJet. So this is UV cured resin. This technology still is amazing to me that what what we can do in three d. We get a very high resolution, lots of layers for smooth surfaces, and we can it can possess intricate details and vivid colors. This technology is used in making parts that for marketing, so they look pretty. But there's also a use case in the medical field where some of the materials for these printers can mimic the density of bones and muscle and vessels. And these get printed and used to practice surgeries on scans from actual patients. Next, we have SAF or powder bed fusion. So this is a high volume, short run, highly accurate end use parts. These parts have strength. They're tough, and we can produce no numerous parts in a single batch. So these can be stacked in your build volume, and they're supported by the powder in in the system. We have sterile lithography or S of A. This is probably one of the oldest three d printing technologies. It's very good at printing large parts with excellent surface finish and high resolution. We get a good consistent part quality with large volumes. And finally, we can also three d print with metals. So there's several technologies for three d printing metal. The first, laser powder bed fusion. So we have a thin layer of metal powder that spread over our platform, and then lasers melt and fuse the powder the metal powder into your solid. Then there's a technology called binder jet. In this case, we have a thin layer of metal powder that's spread onto our build platform, but there's a liquid binder that's sprayed over the powder to hold it together. Then your printed green part goes into a centering process to fuse the metal particles together. And finally, direct energy deposition. I consider this like high-tech welding. You have a nozzle that's feeding metal powder or wire, and there's a laser or electron beam that's melting it, building it up layer by layer. So let's look at our use case. In the first session of this two part webinar, I created this tooling split. So in the injection molding industry, we we're starting to see more and more of conformal cooling in our cooling channels. What this allows us to do is shape the cooling channels to be a consistent distance from your mold wall or your cavity wall so you get a more uniform cooling in the system. The problem with this is once we start creating these type of things, we cannot machine these using conventional CNC processes. So then now we start using three d metal printing, as our solution for this. So an example machine would be the Bright Laser Technologies machines. This is one of the machines that we sell and support here at GoEngineer. It is a multi laser powder fusion based metal printing. So we have multiple lasers solidifying our metal in different areas of the part to keep consistent temperatures as it's going through, and it's a lot faster turnaround. So we can accelerate our production and achieve shorter cycle delivery times. Then we also can do complex geometries, so we can easily produce intricate designs and expand our manufacturing possibilities. We have very high repeatability and precision. So our tips for three d printing design, so the things that we need to think about, when we're designing a part for three d printing is is figuring out, our support optimization. So if we can keep any overhanging angles, below 45 to 50 degrees, that's going to reduce the need for support structure. So it's it's supporting itself as it's building. Also, if you're going to design threads for three d printing, make sure to use your CAD tools and picking and adjust thread angles to make them self supporting. That's going to avoid fragile, thin, supported threads. And you can always design your mating part to match those threads at the same time. If you're working on an assembly, think about designing your parts to be printed in one piece with proper assembly clearance if you have movement or motion in there. If you use water soluble supports, it's going to ease your post processing process. And, also, think of your part orientation. We wanna orient our parts on the build place to maximize our surface area contact with the build plate. This is going to reduce warping in your part. The more surface area you have the part sticking on your build plate, the more stable it's going to be, and you have a less chance for warping or the part peeling up from your build plate. And, also, look at your wall thicknesses. We wanna reduce excess of wall thicknesses. It's going to help us save time. Some of this can be done in the slicer, with sparse infill if we don't need a solid, solid part. And then we also, wanna add fillets and chamfers to reduce edge warping. It also reduces, which is reducing stress on the part, much like designed for injection molding. So let's look at a slicer. This is the slicer for from GrabCAD. This is what our Stratasys machines use. So we have our part on our build tray in the orientation that we want, and it also creates this sacrificial tower. It what it's doing is it's going over to the tower occasionally and printing a layer to move from support and model build, but it also allows the tip to clean itself out as you're building. And this is what the slice part would look like. So I can go into the slicer animation and look layer by layer of my at my part. Look at the support material build up. The red the yellow area support on here, and green in this case is my part. So we have the ability to go in and adjust the infill, a sparse infill, or we can change the angle of the the paths that we're going in there and making sure that we're getting good consistent wall thicknesses through through our product that way. So that does it for my tips and technologies for three d printing or additive manufacturing. Dave's gonna come back right now with artificial intelligence or AI. Alright. Let's talk about AI. When I think about AI, I think about it a little bit different. I'm thinking about it as a way to allow me to engineer better and faster. And let's take a look. Okay? So when we talk about SolidWorks AI, we're talking about the next leap in SolidWorks. Right? And how is AI transforming the way we, you and me, are gonna design better and engineer better? Better. So what we're talking about is the next evolution of SOLIDWORKS. For three thirty years, SOLIDWORKS has focused on making engineers like you and me more productive and more capable. AI is gonna allow us to take that mission even further. SolidWorks AI is about helping you and me, engineers, design faster, make better decisions, and automate repetitive work that slows down innovation. It's not learning a new system. The intelligence is built into SOLIDWORKS. The SOLIDWORKS you already know and trust. Now how is it structured? Let's take a look at it. At its foundation, AI, it's a big broad field. Machines emulating human like intelligence. Kinda scary on some level. Right? But within there, there's a machine learning focuses on finding patterns in that data. Okay? Then we're talking about deeper learning that goes deeper with neural networks, processing data the way our brains process data. And that leads us to generative AI, where machines don't just in analyze, they create. The breakthrough that unlocked generative AI is something called a transformer model. And unlike older AI where follow which followed rules and narrow training, these transformer, transformers learned patterns across massive amounts of data and used those patterns to predict what's gonna come next. In language, that means predicting the next word in the sentence. In engineering, that means predicting the next command, feature, or design structure. Now we're entering in the next step beyond generative, a generative, a generative AI. Okay? We're gonna call it Agentic AI. And Agentic AI does not replace these models. It coordinates them. Instead of generating a single response, it will understand the context, break the problem into steps, select the right model or, method of competency. It will invoke tools and APIs. It will execute the workflow. And so if a if generative AI creates agentive agentic AI, reasons, plans, and acts, In SOLIDWORKS, that distinction matters because we are moving from AI that assists individual commands, to AI that can orchestrate engineering tasks across design, simulation, and documentation. Now there are many types of AI. But for engineers, what matters is how AI helps us do work. At SolidWorks, AI is gonna show up in two ways, embedded intelligence in the tools and virtual companions that help engineers reason and automate workflow. So when we look at virtual companions or we look at embedded, we really think about it in two ways. It's either going to advise or it's going to act. And advise means it's understanding the issue, what's wrong, and what's next. The action or the act is going to be doing real work, triggering a process, creating your geometry, those type of acts. Now we have three virtual companions. We have Marie, the scientist, who's gonna apply deep scientific reasoning and advanced, validation. Leo, the engineer, is gonna validate design integrity, manufacturability, and system constraints. And you got Aura. This is gonna connect context, knowledge, and bit win business intent. And together, they advise and act across workflows. Let's take a look at some of the AI that you have right now and what's coming in f d o three, f d o four in coming years. SOLIDWORKS and AI smart tools that you have right now. Think about the tools that we have right now. Sketch expert, feature expert. Think about feature expert. Feature expert will realize that the feature I'm about to create isn't gonna work because there's gonna be ketchup and mustard over in my feature tree. It'll reorganize the feature tree so that I don't have ketchup and mustard. Same thing with draft expert. I may have a fill it in the wrong place. And when I apply the draft after that, it's gonna cause a failure. And what will happen is draft expert and the AI will reorder the feature tree so that I don't have those errors. Now let's take a look at some of the AI we have right now. Okay? So let's take this one. We go in here and and we've all done this. We've deleted a feature and now there's a bunch of mustard over in our feature tree. So we'll go in and edit it. Now look at this dimension is now dangling. So I go to display delete, relations and I pick on repair all dangling and it went ahead and repaired it. It was simple but it's AI fixing our model. Pretty smart. Pretty cool. I gotta tell you, the selection accelerators are just awesome. This is so great. It's just a huge time saver. Because if I pick this edge and I got these accelerators and if I move across here, guess what? I can pick what I want to fill it or chamfer all at one time, and they're editable. So that makes it nice. What about auto fastener recognition? We've all had to bring in hardware, whether that's toolbox or maybe we're bringing in Mastercard hardware or Granger or something. Right? So I got a steel washer. Guess what? I can drag it over. And now with the built in AI, guess what? I didn't have to do several mates. When I drag in that washer, it recognized the hole. It put, concentric, and it mated the faces. What about this bolt? In times past, what you might had to do is go in and create mate references. Right? Now I don't have to do that. The intelligence is built in. So I'm gonna move this bolt to this hole. And And oftentimes, we would have in the bolt would come in upside down, and we sit there and fiddle around with trying to fix mates, and it was a mess. The nice part is I can just drag them directly out of my downloads now. And look what I'm doing. I'm dragging this washing. I'm washing dragging in this nut. Pretty nice, pretty awesome, pretty easy rock and roll. Right? Again, making our lives faster by eliminating the repetitive tasks like creating a whole bunch of, mates here. Now this one's really cool. For those of you on, the, three d experience platform in XDesign, I've got this, plane here, and I'm gonna bring in a picture. And I think this is absolutely a really cool tool. So what I wanna do is I don't need all the text. I just need the linkage. Right? So I'm gonna say two d mechanism. I'm gonna crop my picture. That looks pretty good. And I'll say generate preview. And And when I generate the preview, I'm gonna go hide the picture, and there's the mechanism. How cool was that? How much time did that save for us? Again, work faster, smarter. What about auto generate drawings? You know? If is is is it perfect right now? I would say no. Is it getting there? It's getting better and better each release. And I would say that right now, if it gets me 60% of the way and it takes me an hour to do a drawing, I just save thirty six minutes. Am I gonna still have to go in there and clean it up every once in a while? Yeah. Go in there and double check. I wouldn't release drawings without checking them and nor would you. Is there gonna be work to do? Yeah. I might have to reorientate things. I might have to go in and redo my magnetic mates or adjust some spacing and make my drawing the way I want. But, again, if this takes me twenty four minutes, I just saved 60% of an hour. Think about how many more drawings I can get out now. So those are some of the tools that you have right now. Okay? Let's take a look at what's out that came out in f d o one, f d o two here this year. So we're gonna leverage the power of AI to help analyze and resolve issues. Now I go in here. I see that there's a problem. I'm gonna click on ask virtual companion. And over on the right, the AI is going through here, and it's starting to look at everything that's going on. And Leo says, hey. The root cause is this cut extrude one. What is causing the cascading errors in the dependent features? So what are we gonna do? We're gonna go over here and we're gonna look at the sketch. And when we look at the sketch, one of my lines is actually turned into a construction or a reference geometry. So I fix it and it fixes the whole model. Now I'm gonna tell you right now, I've never fixed one little thing like that and the whole model fixed. And if you ever do it and it works like that, go get yourself a lottery ticket because it's your lucky day. It just never works that way. But, again, the intelligence knew where to point us. What about assembly structure? This is great. It used to be called treehouse. Think of it that way. But what I wanna do is I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna tell Leo to generate an assembly product structure of a BattleBot. And guess what? It doesn't really know how I wanna construct it, but it what it did was it give me a pretty good, layout of of the things I'm gonna need. I got my top level assembly. I've got sub assemblies, and I can keep altering it by talking and interfacing with my my agent Leo here. And I keep working at it, and now I know what parts and sub assemblies I gotta go create, and they're all sitting there. So I could say generate, and now there's my top level, and then I go build my parts. And this is what my robot looks at the end. Now it didn't do all that for me. I had to go create the physical parts and the assemblies, but at least I knew the structure I needed. This one is an incredible change. This b rep, we've all imported models that don't fit. And sometimes you you download, change happens somewhere else. The next thing you know, this thing doesn't work and that doesn't work, and we're downloading six parts from Granger, McMaster Carr, or wherever. And so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, can I convert this geometry into a parametric design? Alright. I'm asking Leo to do it, and it's gonna generate a preview. And I'm gonna say convert to geometry. Now look what happened over here on the left. I'm gonna turn that original b rep model off, and now I've got a SolidWorks model just like we always wanted, a parametric model rather, that I can go edit the features on. That's a huge advancement. Now, what did it take a little longer than that? Probably. But the the thought process on it is amazing. Right? Think about how much time that now saves. What about assembly performance? No one likes to mess around with assemblies that are struggling to open or or they're slow, and we're trying to figure out what the problem is. You know, now we can start to use these AI agents to how much faster would my assembly be if I if if I suppress the fasteners. And right now, it's analyzing the model, and it's telling me, hey. Guess what? The fasteners contribute 4,500,000 triangles. Right? And how much time saving that would be. That's an incredible feature to figure out why my assemblies are so slow. Okay? Now what's coming now? What's coming up in July '3? Let's take a look. Leo prompted drawing. This one's great. I can't wait to see this one. I wanted to create a drawing, and Leo is asking me what format and default templates do I wanna use. I've already set up my default templates. I've already told SolidWorks where to go get it. The sheet formats, standard views, model path, I've given all of it that information. Leo recognizes it and gives me a preview of the drawing. And this is kinda the next evolution in these generate drawings. Right? I'm gonna tell Leo, alright. Proceed. And I'm gonna say yes. Now, again, this could be happening on one screen and over on another screen, I'm doing work. So, again, we're able to get more work done faster, which means product to market faster. That's more revenue. Right? Hopefully, more raises. So, again, really cool. Did it take some cleanup? Yeah. Still got a drawing view up there that's messed up in a dimension. But I gotta touch it to approve it and review it. So nothing too crazy there. What about model insights? Here, I got this assembly. And I might say, hey, Leo. How about, how many vibration dampening mounts do I have in my assembly? Right? And it says I got eight. Cool. And open the assemblies with it. So I'm looking at these assemblies, and maybe I realized that these are the wrong material. Right? And I'm starting to go, okay. How much do they weigh? You know? What is the material? And I'm interacting right now with my model, and I say replace it with natural rubber. Now what would happen here? Typically, what we would be doing is going in and do a replace component and hoping, like, all the mates and everything solved across multiple, instances. Right? Here, it just went ahead and did it, and now I've I've been able the total mass of the assembly is x. Right? So I've been able to save some weight. K? Pretty cool tools. What's coming later this year in f d o four? Okay? Man, this one's really cool. So let's say I'm building a robotics team. Right? I'm trying to come up with a new BattleBot design. Can you help me think of five cool, unique, BattleBot themes? So now SolidWorks and Aura and everything's looking at it. It's It's going, okay. Cool. It's looking out on the web, and it says, hey. Okay. Cool. And I say generate some images. And all of a sudden, it generates some images. And this might be what you want, might not. Ask it to create some more. I think that's incredible. K? Now what's coming beyond? Okay? And whether this is 2027 or 2028, don't know. We'll see. Okay? Drawing to parametric model. Okay. So this one's a really cool one. Can't wait to see this. I saw it as three d experience world this year, and this was cool. I've got an old PDF, and I need to get this part recreated. And I start to look at, you know, hey. I wanna make this sketch. I wanna look at the views. I'm gonna say make sketch. And what it's gonna do is gonna read in these planes that the sketches were on, and there's my sketches. Now whether I'm talking to the AI or I'm typing in on the AI, there it is. And in just a few minutes, I was able to recreate this part by just using the AI tools from a PDF. Okay? And that's pretty crazy. But what if I wanna go one step further? What if I start talking to it and say, hey. Maybe I wanna do a linear, FEA on it. There it is. It's already done it. Now do I need to be have gone through the SolidWorks simulation classes so I understand what that data means. But, again, pretty cool way to go forward. What about image to mesh? This one is incredible. This is a super powerful tool. I've seen this over on the CATIA side some with something called visual scripting that does something similar. So let's take a couple images here, and we wanna create this baby stroller. So I'm gonna bring in a couple images of the baby stroller. And guess what? Within a few minutes, I'm gonna have a new stroller in a mesh model, and I can interact with it. I can go in here, and I can interface with it, and maybe I add a cup holder. Amazing technology. What about Spectacad? Well, I need to design a steel structure. This one, you if you were at three d experience world this year, you saw it. And they start to put in some some, a water tower. Right? And I start to put in, like, what are the wind conditions for Massachusetts, the shape, the capacity, and all of that. And guess what it did? It went ahead in its generative AI, and it went in and designed the structure based on the the, requirements. And now if I wanna run some some, some, simulation on it, I can. So I look at it, and I can analyze it. Cool, Jeff. I add my water, tower. and kaboom. job. Pretty crazy. Good job, Right? Jeff. This. is what was gonna allow us, to work faster, work smarter. fastener recognition And so. when we think about AI, insane, yeah. let's not be scared of it. add the mates it. and Let's. use it to allow. That's gonna, to make. smarter decisions, yeah, we were, just talking about some of the cool AI tools, us to work, on more products the drawings more product. together know? faster. Just to be able to get 60% of the way or 70% of the way there means huge time saving. Right? Or just some of the tools that could be running on one machine while we're designing on another part is huge. I mean, I know you're you're you're heavily involved with the plastics and the injection molding, and I can't wait to see what it does for designs on that side. That'll be kinda cool. Yeah. Super cool. I don't see, finally, a feature expert that doesn't end in tears. Yeah. Well said, Jared. But over the course of these two weeks here, a lot of what we've shown you is just scratching the surface, of the technologies, and we encourage you to go up for those of you that have access to the GoEngineer customer portal, and sign up for the online classes or the in person classes or virtual, however you can attend them, and go through the full full class and understand the full capabilities of plastics or cam, additive manufacturing, whatever the case may be. So There any questions? If you have any questions, pop it in in the q and a or the chat over there. Pretty quiet group today, Jeff. Yes. I think everybody's ready for the weekend or something. How about you, Jeff? You ready for the weekend? Yes, sir. It's only Wednesday. I'm already ready. Oh, cool. Thanks, Michael. We appreciate that comment. That was the goal of this, you know, to just think about, again, we you know, Jeff and I see it all the time, and we're probably guilty of it at times. You know, we're we're trying to get a product to market, and usually, the first time we design something, we're not really always thinking about the how it's gonna be manufactured. I know Jeff thinks about it probably more than I do because that's his specialty, you know, over on the injection molds and the mold side. But sometimes we're just slamming and jamming to get a part out, and we don't think about how somebody's actually gonna make it or machine it or and then somebody kicks it back to us and go, that's not manufacturable. Yeah. So that sucks. So what version is that fastener auto meeting available came? out that came out last year in f twenty twenty five. It was in the f d o five. I'm sorry. The f d o three release. So it's probably in s p three, I would think, is probably the correlation there. 2025. And there's some great videos. I know, if you go to the GoEngineer, YouTube page, Caitlin and our our video team have put several videos up on that. So good question, Sean. Thanks for being here today. Cool. Well, if there's no further questions, Jeff, I've got a class here. I think we'll hop off. Yep. Go teach. version of GoTeach. Alright, everybody. Have a great Wednesday and the rest of the week. Jeff, always a pleasure to see you. Oh, there's no one to come here. Oh, Sean. Thanks. Thank you, Sean. Appreciate everybody being here. Gigi, thanks for all your great work. I appreciate you. So is Jeff. Jeff, talk to you later, brother. See you.