Learn about the advanced features of SOLIDWORKS, a top-rated modeling program, and how it allows engineers and designers to easily make changes, try new ideas, and build families of similar parts. This article delves into the benefits of using parametric modeling, the SOLIDWORKS interface, and the different applications added to your drive after downloading SOLIDWORKS.
Key Insights
- The SOLIDWORKS software uses parametric modeling, which enables users to set rules and measurements for designs, making it possible to automatically update a design when changes are made, thereby saving time and reducing errors.
- Upon downloading SOLIDWORKS, four new applications are added to your drive: SOLIDWORKS 2025, eDrawings 2025, SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2025 for creating photorealistic renderings, and SOLIDWORKS Visualize Boost.
- The SOLIDWORKS interface contains several features including the Task Pane, the standard toolbar, a search bar, and the command manager among others. It also allows customization of tabs and mouse gestures to make modeling more seamless.
This lesson is a preview from our SOLIDWORKS Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Hi, in this lesson, I'm going to explain what SOLIDWORKS is and what makes it so special, as well as show you the interface where you'll be building your parts for the first time. Here I have a power drill that I've designed in SOLIDWORKS. You can see all the unique aspects that make this power drill what it is.
All those aspects live right here to the left in this menu of commands that, when built in order as it was, create something as complex as this. SOLIDWORKS is the top modeling program because it uses parametric modeling, which means you can set rules and measurements for your designs. With parametric modeling, if you change one part, like making a hole bigger or a piece longer, the rest of the design automatically updates to match those changes.
It saves a lot of time and helps avoid mistakes because you don't have to redo everything when you want to make updates. SOLIDWORKS lets engineers and designers easily make changes, try new ideas, and build families of similar parts, which is why it is such a powerful modeling tool. Now let's go ahead and open SOLIDWORKS together.
So I'm going to close this out. I'm going to click this check mark. I'm going to close the program entirely by clicking this check mark up here at the top right-hand corner.
All right. Now, since you've downloaded SOLIDWORKS, four new applications have been added to your drive. The first is, of course, SOLIDWORKS 2025.
We also have eDrawings 2025, SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2025, which is a rendering program that allows you to create photorealistic renderings of your designs, and SOLIDWORKS Visualize Boost. Let's double-click SOLIDWORKS 2025 and open the program. We'll give it a second to boot up.
Okay. Each time we open SOLIDWORKS, we're brought to this main page. Now, there's not really a lot we can do here because we haven't decided what type of file we're going to create yet, but let's take a look at what we have in front of us right now.
Over to the right, we have what's called the Task Pane, and it has a number of tabs that we can open that allow us to access different commands. At the top, we have the standard toolbar with everything from file, viewing new files. We can roll over buttons to see what they do for us, creating new files, opening files, or updating our settings and our options if we choose to do that.
We also have a search bar here at the top that allows us to search commands or, if we click this arrow for the drop-down menu, search online SOLIDWORKS help, files and models on our drive, or my SOLIDWORKS, which is linked to your account. This button allows us to access different help options. If we were to click it, we can explore the program even further.
Let's go ahead and open up a file for the very first time. So, I'm going to go up here to file and then click new, and it gives us a choice of three different file types that we can open. SOLIDWORKS allows you to create parts, assemblies, or drawings.
A part is the collection of one body or multiple bodies in 3D space. An assembly is a collection of part files or other assembly files or both, and a drawing file is essentially a blueprint that we create that shows the design intent behind assemblies or parts. For right now, let's make sure that part is highlighted, and we'll click okay.
And here we are, brought to you SOLIDWORKS within a part file and showing all the commands that exist within this type of file. It's already begun a new sketch for us, which we don't want to work on right now. So, if you have this button selected, go ahead and go to the right hand side, find this red X and click it.
Discard changes and exit. All right, and now we are out of that sketch. Let's look through the interface a little bit.
So, we've already looked at the task pane over here at the right hand side. At the bottom of the screen, we have our status bar, which tells us a little bit of what we're working on. To the right, there's this custom drop-down menu.
If we click it, we can choose what type of measurement system we'd like to work in. For this course, we will use inches, pounds, and seconds. I'm going to select that.
Great. Over here to the left is our feature manager or design tree. As we create commands in this program and build our model from scratch, those commands will populate this feature tree and create a long list.
And when it's run in order, it kind of works like code in that the program recognizes each command in chronological order and builds upon itself to create the model, which will be shown here in the middle of the screen. This is known as the graphics area, and this is where your 3D model will live. Above that is the heads-up view toolbar.
These are all the commands that allow us to view our model in different ways, from viewing it in sections to viewing basic orthographic, front, right, bottom, plan view types of views. We can view it as a line drawing, as a solid body, we can show hidden lines. We'll get more into this in later lessons, but for now, we know where to find all our new tools.
At the very top, we have what's called the command manager. This is where we will find all of the tools that we will use to build our model. Now, right now, the command manager is only showing one tab, and that's basic modeling tools.
If we right-click on this, it'll bring up a menu with a drop-down button that says tabs, and we can customize what tabs are available in our command manager. The first thing I want to add, and you should do this too, is sketch. I'm going to right-click it again and add features.
I'll right-click again and add surfaces, and then I'll right-click one more time, go to tabs, and I'll remove basic modeling tools. Here we are. Now, we have three tabs we've selected for our command manager, each with the unique commands associated with that type of task.
At the very top, we have our menu toolbar, which has the basic menu items such as open files, save files, save as, and each one has a drop-down menu, which allows us access to other commands. And then here on the far right-hand side, we have our options button, which we'll discover later in a future lesson, allowing us to customize mouse gestures, hotkeys, and any type of preferences that we wish to customize for ourself. It'll make modeling a lot more easy and seamless as we move through the course.
In the next lesson, we're going to build a cube in 3D space for the first time. We'll show the origin, we'll talk about the relationships between planes and sketches to volumes, and begin to build 3D models so we can explore the program further.
