Ok, someone has asked me what my single greatest SolidWorks tip for large assemblies is. When you choose “File, Open,” you are taking a file from fixed disk and loading it into RAM. I was surprised that this part was flagged as a “problem part” as this part should have been a simple tire used in four places in our assembly. … Open large assembly in design review form Windows Explorer. Since we are loading data from the hard drive into RAM, and saving from RAM onto the hard drive, these read/write speeds are extremely important, and we want the fastest possible read/write speeds to obtain the fastest open and save times from SOLIDWORKS. Beyond this, your physical computer hardware and networking setup may play a role in the amount of time it takes to open and save your larger assemblies. He has been working with SOLIDWORKS software since 1998 and has been providing training, technical support and tips and tricks since 2001. Manage your resources using various system options. An example of examining and comparing the specification for the read/write of an HDD against an SSD. These can not be edited or shown in the feature manager design … Our plane will be the Front Plane. For components with complex geometry, perhaps used for reference, or manufactured elsewhere, the SOLIDWORKS Simplify tool can help reduce the complexity and the time to open and rebuild models.. A new Silhouette option is now available to help simplify an assembly based on the outlines of components and bodies. Figure 9. It’s SOLIDWORKS Large Assembly Design Review Mode. For designing simpler projects, there is no need to go through the hassle of learning all of these advanced methods and techniques in Creo. A part model of a tire with far too much detail. Our usual first step which I would not spend too much time on. I have a large assembly with several sub-assemblies. The Defeature tool has been enhanced in SOLIDWORKS 2019; enabling users to massively defeature assemblies to remove unnecessary detail or to protect intellectual property. Next, use the command WINDOW>CLOSE ALL to close the current assembly. Let’s take a look at each cause of slow performance and examine some common approaches to making assemblies faster. Secondly, the name of the folder is not parametric. This will give you the ability to sort your assembly by a variety of criteria. Keep in mind that we are using this tire in four places, so the level of detail in the detailed configuration will be multiplied by the number of instances. READ PAPER. Is it an assembly that is 20MB in file size? Figure 4. The first thing you need to look at when determining why a file is slow to open or save is whether there is anything you can do with the hardware you are using. When discussing SOLIDWORKS large assembly performance with my students, I often will say,“There is no one single magic option to make assemblies perform faster. We can see all of the detail of the tire treading and the extruded text around the sidewall of the tire. In this video, we learn about SOLIDWORKS Lightweight Mode, and … In this article, we discussed a lot of tips and tricks for working with a large assembly. When activated, this feature loads models quickly and allows users to manipulate, measure, and section models to accurately review designs. For example, in the English unit system an A-size drawing sheet is 8.5 × 11 in. In this blog, I will break down some of these techniques and some of the terminology of large assembly management. I asked him, “Approximately what size is the assembly?” My goal was to determine how large the file size was and/or how many components were in the assembly. Next, utilize the command FILE>PACK AND GO and make a copy of the entire assembly (using the prefix “Test-“) in a temporary folder on your local fixed disk. Figure 8. If I had to split my knuckles across the edge of my desk about anything, it would be the frustration that comes with large assembly management in SolidWorks. Open an assembly with SOLIDWORKS Large Assembly mode, Large Assembly Design Review, Resolved, and Lightweight modes. Third, Solidworks has steadily created thumbnails of parts, assemblies, drawings that facilitate selection in the window expander. Alternatively, users who want to share their large assemblies with non-SOLIDWORKS users can share eDrawings files that can be viewed within the eDrawings Viewer. This will help you to get the fastest possible read/write times when saving and opening your assemblies. A listing of standard sheet sizes is … Figure 5.Time to open the same large assembly on the same computer with lightweight mode Offvs On. SOLIDWORKS Assembly Modeling Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation 175 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 U.S.A. Rod is the Javelin Webmaster and is based in Ottawa, ON., Canada. A hefty file size can also make it difficult to share your designs with clients and reviewers. Instead, it could be a combination of hardware, settings and modeling techniques. Assembly roughly speaking help you make a complex model made of other models previously created. Since the amount of data being loaded into memory has a direct impact on how long the assembly takes to open, it should make sense that an assembly requiring less RAM would take less time to load. Large Assembly Mode is a collection of system settings that improves the performance of assemblies. For example, when opening an assembly, all of the associated parts feature history is loaded into me… After you launch this tool, SOLIDWORKS will sort your assembly based on a given criteria. SolidWorks is published by Dassault Systèmes. When working with a large assembly that is slow to rotate, zoom in and out, add mates or switch between windows, we can often narrow the problem down to one of two issues: Either the image quality is dialed up too high on these components, or the level of detail included in these components is too fine. You can turn on Large Assembly Mode at any time. 100MB in file size? © Copyright 2018 ENGINEERING.com - Sponsored by Dassault Systèmes, Detect and Correct Model Quality Issues with SOLIDWORKS Design Checker, Learn How GE Healthcare Optimizes Products with CFD, Design Through Analysis: Simulation-Driven Product Development Pays Business Dividends in Transition to Smart Manufacturing, Design Through Analysis: Today’s Designers Greatly Benefit From Simulation-Driven Product Development, Design Through Analysis: Simulation-Driven Design Speeds System Level Design and Transition to Manufacturing, Giaffone Racing: Expanding Into New Racing Markets with Topology Optimization Tools, Empower Ecommerce with 3D Technology and SOLIDWORKS, A New Approach to Modelling Lattices and Other Complex Geometry, Descending the Grand Canyon in a Wheelchair, What the Power of the Cloud Brings to Engineering and CAD, 4 Reasons Why You Should Care About the New 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS Offers, “Why is my assembly so slow to open and save?”, “Why is my assembly so slow to work with?”, Significantly slows down your standard workflow, Slow to work with (rotate, zoom in and out, add mates, switch between windows), Overly detailed features (like the thread pattern in the tire, knurling, ribbing, etc. We start with the first part, the simple cover panel. Based on years of experience helping customers with large assembly issues we have found that adopting the latest SOLIDWORKS techniques … Choosing to turn off automatic rebuild will allow you to quickly jump between open parts and assemblies without … I like to follow this basic rule: If I cannot see the feature when zoomed to fit in the top-level assembly, then that feature can be suppressed in the simplified configuration of the part. Either way, both issues produce the same result: Too many polygons being rendered at the assembly level will result in an assembly that is very slow to work with. The results on our assembly performance would be quite significant. Troubleshoot large assemblies. Introduction to SolidWorks . If the SOLIDWORKS files are stored on a fixed disk in a network location, it will take longer to open and save the files than it would if the files were stored on a local fixed disk (i.e., stored in your laptop or tower). Opens the assembly and all of the associated file information. Solidworks assembly. The specification we are most interested in during our discussion about assemblies being slow to open or slow to save is the specification for read and write time (sometimes specified as RANDOM I/O Performance). With over 1,000 parts? using Defeature, Envelope, Large Design Review. Primarily the graphical information and reference geometry are loaded into memory, but the features that define the part are not. Watch the status in the lower left corner in the software and wait until the assembly is fully loaded into RAM (when you are no longer seeing a Windows hourglass icon). In SolidWorks, you can open an assembly and select File, Save as…, SolidWorks Part. You can also set a threshold for the number of components to automatically open the assembly in Large Assembly Mode when that threshold is reached. Combine this with the first one when you don’t need a lot of extra detail shown in the model for even more improvements. One of the best tools available in SOLIDWORKS for troubleshooting a large assembly is the “Assembly Visualization” tool found on the “Evaluate” toolbar. Design Intent, Sketching and Sketch Entities SOLIDWORKS ® 2018 Reference Guide Page 4 - 4 Design Intent in an Assembly Utilizing symmetry, reusing common parts and using the Mate relation between parts builds the design intent into an assembly. The plate is a component of a larger assembly. Organize a large assembly using Treehouse, SpeedPak, and more. Then click the start button on your stopwatch at the same time as you press the Open button in SOLIDWORKS. These are not considered top-down design because they don't use any of the other parts in the assembly. This increased the functionality of the feature … The answer to this question is Yes—there is a terrific option built into SOLIDWORKS known as “Load Assembly Components Lightweight,” which accomplishes this very task. Figure 1. Large Displacement for Static Studies in SOLIDWORKS Written by Silvio Perez on January 11, 2016 1 Comment I am sure that many of us who have run a simulation static study have come across this warning message, where an excessive displacement warning was generated and asked us to continue running the current study or enable the Large Displacement option to improve the accuracy. After opening this part, we confirm that the geometry is fairly simple, so we take a look at the Image Quality of this part by going into TOOLS>OPTIONS>DOCUMENT PROPERTIES. The load can be pressure, force, temperature, gravity, centrifugal or even loads imported from previous simulation studies. This fixed disk could be a local drive (stored in your laptop or tower), or the fixed disk could be a network drive. A different approach is to add one or more components into an assembly which could be considered the master or driving components. The faster the read/write speeds (or RANDOM IO/s) are, the faster your assemblies will load from your local hard drive into RAM. Large Assembly Mode is a collection of system settings that improves the performance of assemblies. Opening the same assembly from a network location vs from a local hard drive folder. Then click Stop on your stopwatch. Tobias Richard is a SOLIDWORKS elite applications engineer from Philadelphia, Pa. To Company B, an assembly of 50 parts might be considered a small assembly. 500MB in file size? What you will find is that a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) will almost always have slower read/write speeds than its contemporary counterpart in the solid-state drive (SSD) field. Figure 3. I like to answer the question with the following rule: Figure 1. Our cover panel with the image quality cranked all the way to the highest level on the right. SOLIDWORKS Composer works hand in hand with SOLIDWORKS CAD by converting part and assembly files to workable models for documentation. File and platform compatibility We want to compare like to like, so the versions used here are AutoCAD 2020 and SolidWorks 2020. SpeedPak. As you can see, there is far too much detail in this tire. The SOLIDWORKS help file says: “When a component is lightweight, only a subset of its model data is loaded in memory. The default criteria is mass, but this isn’t very helpful in determining which components are causing the assembly to perform poorly. The assembly contains a linear pattern of holes. Once these have been placed in the correct location, further components which could be considered as slave or driven can be added into their correct position in the assembly in a state which is not quite complete. The component plate has the (f) prefix, but not the assembly. We have saved this tip for last, but it is certainly one of the biggest contributing factors to poor performance in a large assembly that I have seen (over my career in tech support). them together in an assembly in tutorial 7. This, of course, turns the entire assembly into a single part.I’ll save it in the same directory and give it the same custom properties as the original assembly. Therefore, utilizing the option for lightweight components is my third tip for getting better performance when working with your large assemblies. which industries the software is intended to serve) 2. My SOLIDWORKS Large Assembly is Slow to Open . Less RAM will be required per component, which means that less RAM will be required for the entire assembly, so your assemblies will open and save faster when the components are set to lightweight. With large assembly mode, you can control which information you keep and what is removed once your assembly reaches a certain number of components. It is therefore very important that you save everything that you make (parts, assemblies and drawings)! SolidWorks is a solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) computer program that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows.While it is possible to run SolidWorks on an Intel-based Mac with Windows installed, the application's developer recommends against this. So far, we have discussed some things you can do to increase the speeds in which SOLIDWORKS can access files stored on the fixed disk and load these files into RAM. We generally break up poor performance in a large assembly into two types of slowness: Although there are some overlapping culprits to slow performance, there are generally different causes for the two different types of slowness, which means that you may need to fix each type of slowness by using a different approach. The remaining model data is loaded on an as-needed basis.” Essentially, this means that a lightweight component in an assembly has all of its 3D geometry loaded into memory, but the feature tree for these components is not loaded into RAM (until it is required). That being said, the option to load components lightweight is the closest we get to this magic option to make assemblies perform faster.”. Are you using large assemblies and it sometimes takes long to open? What is a “large assembly” in SOLIDWORKS? When we open the tire into its own window, we see what is shown in Figure 11. o Modify a part and understand how the changes are updated throughout the program o Name the three primary environments and identify what they are used for . Collaboration tools and business features 4. Design features and functions 3. This is a fantastic feature allowing to open huge assemblies in a matter of seconds, not minutes (or even hours in some cases). The goal of this blog is to illustrate some of these settings and techniques to help your assemblies perform better and faster. As you can see from the figure, simply checking this option and closing and reopening the same assembly on the same computer will reduce the time required to open the assembly from 1minute 10seconds down to 27seconds. By the time you finish reading this tutorial, you should be able to successfully: * Model a basic part in SolidWorks * Successfully add basic features to the parts * Fully assemble multiple parts using basic mate features Necessary Tools: The amount of time required to create your part assembly will depend on the detail involved in the parts that you are trying to model. The assembly allows me to Fix/Float, but not the component. Even our old SW could handle our assemblies easily on our old workstation. At the time of writing this article ( September 2017), most professional SOLIDWORKS workstations are equipped with a processer running at 3GHz (or faster) and 16GB of RAM (or more). To make for a fair comparison, we are going to judge each program using four criteria: 1. When importing IGES, STEP, UG and ACIS files into SolidWorks there are several options for how you want to import the files. So, the fourth tip of this blog is to use the Assembly Visualization tool to sort by “SW-Open Time,” “SW-Rebuild Time” and “Graphics-Triangles” in order to identify the specific components in your assembly that are requiring an unusually high demand on your system resources. SolidWorks does not support macOS. Figure 10. About the Author . At the end, I will leave you with a list of my top six tools to get the best possible performance from your large assemblies. Determining your current system resources. A good setting for Image Quality. SolidWorks is published by Dassault Systèmes. Surface/solid entities Try forming solid(s) – SolidWorks attempts to knit the surfaces into solids. Create a new folder for this purpose. In SOLIDWORKS 2019, Large Design review has been enhanced to include assembly editing capabilities. Large Design Review is a capability that has been available in SOLIDWORKS® for many years and allows users to open very large assemblies lightning fast, giving you the ability to quickly interrogate a model or conduct design reviews. SolidWorks is becoming more widely used in the industry due to its easy nature. The original designers have set configurations of the plate in 2 positions, but I want to free up the plate to move as I drag it. So, for the sake of conformity, for this article, we will consider a “large assembly” to be any assembly that slows down a computer running this hardware. Fortunately for us, SOLIDWORKS provides several tools for checking the form, fit and function of assembly components prior to manufacturing, helping you avoid design rework and heartache. RAM, or random access memory, is the much faster temporary storage where files are loaded when we are working on them in SOLIDWORKS. Lesson 1.2 User Interface: o Identify the key elements of the Command Manager Enjoy, and as always, please post your comments and questions below. Large Assembly Mode – This state loads in a collection of system settings, mostly display and view settings, with the aim of turning off any settings which could hinder the systems (SOLIDWORKS Assemblies file’s) performance. Although there are several settings that can help decrease the amount of time required to open a large assembly, the one that has the greatest impact (and is the easiest to understand) is found in TOOL>OPTIONS>SYSTEM OPTIONS>PERFORMANCE and is the checkmark for “Automatically load components lightweight” (see Figure 5). You can turn on Large Assembly Mode at any time. Step 1. SolidWorks is a solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) computer program that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows.While it is possible to run SolidWorks on an Intel-based Mac with Windows installed, the application's developer recommends against this. This will lead to very poor performance, particularly when this component is used in multiple locations in an assembly. Create a Circle with its origin set at the origin of the sketch, click on Smart Dimension and give 150 mm as a diameter. Whenever you open an assembly and begin working, and your computer starts to chug(aka slow down), you are working on a large assembly. Generally speaking, the most common culprits of over-detailing are: Models that have these types of features should have a simplified configuration generated, and as your sixth and final tip, this simplified configuration should be used in your top-level large assembly to drastically cut down on the total number of polygons, which will speed up processes such as rotating the model, switching between windows, and creating a drawing of the top-level assembly. Figure 2. Solidworks Simulation uses FEA (Finite Element Analysis) methods to identify the behavior of parts or assemblies/parts when a load is applied. Figure 1: Example of a large assembly. You can also see that the amount of RAM required to open the same assembly on the same computer dropped from 2.718 GB to 1.479 GB, simply by checking on the option to open the assembly using lightweight components. Whenever you open an assembly and begin working, and your computer starts to chug(aka slow down), you are working on a large assembly. Speed pack, complex assembly and reduced mode are terms you don't know? In my first blog, I showed several examples of a large assembly that was slow to open, slow to save, and slow to work with. Each sub-assembly needs its own cover drawing with BOM, followed by drawings of each part. That, all you SolidWorks Pros may know, is a large request in itself. First, each file has an extension that makes sorting easier. Below is a list of the main options and how to change them. However, since the feature tree of the model is not loaded into memory, far less RAM is required per component. Using Assembly Visualization to sort by Graphics-Triangles. This method loads more data than the Advanced Configuration method does, but it's still likely to work for troubleshooting. Example A: Reuse geometry in an assembly. As you can see in Figure 12, a simplified configuration of this tire has been created without the tire treads and the extruded text around the tire’s sidewall. For example, while working in an assembly, you could edit a component's extrusion to reverse its direction or edit a fillet to add more edges from the same component. In the metric unit system an A4-size drawing sheet is 210 × 297 mm. The point of this story is to illustrate that there can be a lot of confusion surrounding the question of what a “large assembly” is. Open Large Assembly In Design Review Mode From File Explorer. Step 3. With that in mind, my second tip for improving performance with large assemblies is to utilize a SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive to store and save your SOLIDWORKS assemblies. Large Design Review – This is the fastest and least resource intense mode. SolidWorks does not support macOS. In SOLIDWORKS 2017, the most useful criteria for determining which components are causing an assembly to run poorly are “SW-Open Time,” “SW-Rebuild Time” and “Graphics-Triangles.” You will often see corresponding results; for example, a part that takes a long time to rebuild will also take a long time to open, and will have a large number of graphics triangles. As you can see in Figure 9, the image quality is set far too high. Since different computers will have different hardware, what constitutes a “large assembly” on one machine (meaning what causes the computer to slow down when working on this assembly) may … SOLIDWORKS - How to Import IGES, STEP, UG and ACIS Files as an Assembly. He has fielded … In this blog series I’ve been covering each of those variables to help you get your SOLIDWORKS large assemblies opened, working, and saving faster. I was once working on a SOLIDWORKS Tech Support case and a customer told me that he was working on a large assembly. Keep in mind that many computers today are configured with two hard drives—one SSD for the operating system and programs, and another HDD for data storage. Figure 7. So, a logical question might be: “Is there anything we can do to reduce the amount of information an assembly needs to load into RAM to help speed up the open/save processes? When working with large assembly files, the rebuild time and overall performance of SOLIDWORKS can be less than optimal. Figure 12. If your computer is configured like this, you should try to move your large assembly files on to the SSD before working with them. Because of this, our fifth tip for working with large assemblies is to keep your image quality set to a reasonable value. Drawing sheets, that is, the paper drawings are printed on, are manufactured in standard sizes. What is a “large assembly” in SOLIDWORKS? What I found was that this model had been created with far too much detail to be used in a large assembly. He began working for Prism Engineering (now Fisher Unitech) as an instructor and tech support engineer in 2001. This information may be used to create the mold of the part file for the tire, but it is not necessary to include this detail at the top-level assembly of our project. In Figure 8, we have sorted our assembly by Graphics-Triangles and determined that the first and second part in our assembly are yielding a large number of polygons (or Graphics-Triangles), which could be slowing down our assembly performance. In past testing, I have usually turned Large Assembly Mode off for GPU comparisons - but this time around I wanted to see how it impacted performance, so I ran the Lego Tower (the only assembly we have which is large enough to trigger use of LAM) again. Generally speaking, a large assembly is defined as an assembly in which you start to see slowdowns in your system. 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