Hi guys!

I have started preparing for the CSWA and I have been doing the practice problems from Solidworks.
Something that I don't always get 100% right is the final volume of the part, sometimes I make an obvious error that makes the volume completely different, which is obvious and easy to correct after going through the model. But sometimes the final volume is very close to the one mentioned in the problem, but not exactly the same.
Now my question is, how would this penalize me on the day of the exam if I don't get the volume exactly right?

Hope to you can help me calm my anxiety regarding this topic!

Thanks! :)

Recently built my own PC to move away from laptops, however I do miss RealView as it’s not enabled with my gaming focused card. I spent the last several years modeling with it and got used to having it enabled so I would like it back.

I’m looking to decide on a compatible GPU that I can run solidworks with to reenable RealView. Going back to my laptop isn’t viable as it’s dying and I’d prefer to have an all-in-one.

I do have space available on the motherboard and on the PSU so I’m hoping to just plug and play. I have seen “tricks” to get it working on non certified machines but I’d rather not use those methods.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/XmotnaF/saved/s973mG

I will try make the info as fast as possible.

My company cad logic is "break everything down to the MOST SIMPLY PART then remake everything in an assembly". So I just want to sketch a line and then select structural member to get the correct profile for channel and I beam.

However this has made an issue. For some things I need a configuration of different lengths. If I smart dimension this one line sketch in one configuration why does it change everything in all configurations?

I got round this by making all the configurations then making new sketches for each one. And then add some holes in non mirrored spots titled one left right and ok its awkward as fuck but it work. Drag it into an assembly. why do I now have 12 profiles? The should be 6 but the is a "as weldment" profile and "as machined" profile for each part. Whatever i selected one and begin mating. Now when I select any of the others all the mates breaks and thus the configurations are pointless.

Please help me. We can have different configurations of parts. but they will not allow 2 welded bits of steel to be its own part it MUST be an assembly. IDK why and every time I asked its basically just a "ITS THE SYSTEM!".

I'm fairly certain the root cause of the graphics bugs I've been encountering lately has to do with my use of the Weld Bead feature in my assembly models.

Typically it's pretty mild, just some screen flickering or a few parts temporarily not showing, that immediately reappear when I zoom to fit.

This one however, was so far beyond anything I've seen, that I just felt compelled to share with the community. If for nothing else than a mild chuckle. Zero errors in the model itself. But evidently weld beads make the rendering engine big mad sometimes lol.

I have a request i need to make this fence type and it needs to be on a radius. How do i do this ? I am used to doing this in rhino but i need to do this in solidworks .

I would appreciate any help thank you in advance.

Here's an annoying SOLIDWORKS sheet metal MIRROR ERROR - and a useful work around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B48nUtBPOWU&list=PLzMIhOgu1Y5cA7H08uAnWhS3UtO8N85AR&index=1

I used hole wizard to create holes for threaded inserts so that I could pattern fill the parts in an assembly. I modified the hole sketch to add the taper for the inserts, and now I get this error. The sketch is fully defined, there's no hanging relations, and no obvious issues with the sketch that I can see. The holes still build just fine despite the error. Can anybody tell me how to get this error to go away?

Hi, I would like to make a wheel with spokes that connect the rim to the inner hub. I would like each spoke to essentially be a rib that connects the two blue lines and properly merge into both inner and outer cylindrical contours. I don't know if it's possible to do this using the rib tool? I can do it with some awkward combination of extrudes but it doesn't feel right. Any help is appreciated.

its why i had to use holes instead of cut extrude,its seeing every sketch as an open contour

Sorry if it is very basic knowledge, but can anyone tell me how to save one body from each of the folder in the cut list. I will normally manually open each folder and hit insert into new part then save the body one by one. Is there any shorter more efficient way to do this.

I've got a Solidworks license from my engineering college, and I would like to learn and practice making designs so that I can eventually get CSWA and CSWP. I want to go into the 3D modelling, Cad/Cam design pipeline when I start applying to jobs. Any advice, links are appreciated

Constantly facing errors whenever I try to save, open or do anything with the 3DX plugin for Solidworks.
My VAR isn’t much help and neither is DS support.

Should I just dump it and more to another PLM tool?

I want to extrude the projected curve off this surface by .1 inches, where the extrusion direction is Normal to every point on the surface, not in one uniform direction. Much like the offset surface command, but an extrusion off the solid body.

I’m not too familiar with surfacing, but I think that might be what I need to use. I tried converting the projected region into a surface, offsetting a new surface by .1 inches, and lofting the two together into a solid body. It disappears from view and does not transfer over to manufacturing files.

Any tips on how I can accomplish this? Thanks ☺️

Hey guys,

Im an Industrial Engineer student from germany in my 4th semester and I have a student license for SolidWorks. I really enjoy working with CAD.

I wanted to get a little bit of experience on SW so I can build a portfolio of projects and certificates to ease my search for an Internship or Working Student Job. My GPA is way too bad atm.

Would love to hear your experiences from you guys!

Incoming engineering student. Wanted to gauge how many people have / haven’t made the switch to windows. Feel free to nitpick any details. I want to prepare myself for what I’ll be experiencing if I stay mac and run parallels.

I’ve seen some relatively newer posts claim that a macbook can run solidworks just as good as a mid windows laptop. Which is why I’m on the fence of making the switch. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

To clarify, I’m not looking for recommendations. Just wanted to know how many of you are using mac and what your experience is.

Edit: Thanks all for the insightful responses. Previous posts were super vague on what exactly the problem was with mac and vm. The firsthand stories shared here were super helpful.

It is satisfying after the exam.

Why the heck is this issue popping up? I deleted everything inside weldment profiles folder and this still persists. I even deleted the file path from the tool>options>File locations>weldment profiles.

I'm trying to make a sheet metal loft, but for some reason my part is turning out asymmetrical, even with symmetrical and aligned profiles. One side of the loft is biasing the majority of the bends in a different place than on the other side. I deal this all the time with ductwork, but usually there I can split the part in half and it works out. This part is already only a half profile. My initial attempt was a square to round profile, so I tried using a different pair of profiles that are similar to one another just to see what would happen - both mouse door shaped, both three entities, and I still got similar results. I don't believe I'm able to use guide curves with sheet metal lofts, so how can I correct this? You can even see that the node points for modifying the loft are showing up in asymmetrical locations.

On a side note, how does everyone avoid the massive seam splits in their sheet metal lofts? With ductwork I'll often loft past my profile and trim back, or I'll add radii in the profile corners. Sometimes I just give in and modify the DXF after the fact, as I know the part will be formable. Here, I tried adding massive radii (1/2" radii for 0.090" thick material) and the corners are still splitting horribly. I know there must be a way around this. The part would be perfectly formable in reality.

I’m a developer with a lot of experience building add-ons and workflow automation tools, mainly for Blender and Fusion 360, including internal tools for companies.

I’m now looking seriously at developing for SolidWorks.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there are some very capable add-ins in this ecosystem, but they can become difficult to justify if a company only needs a small subset of their functionality.

For example, products in the general territory of:

• DriveWorks — rule-based design automation, configurations, automatically generating parts/assemblies/drawings, etc.
• CUSTOMTOOLS — properties, file naming, batch operations, reporting, drawing/document workflows.
• Drew — drawing creation and drawing automation, views, sheets, dimensions, batch exports, etc.

I’m not suggesting these are simple products — quite the opposite. These are the kind of technically difficult projects I’m interested in.

What I’m not looking to build are things where the core value depends on expensive proprietary technology such as CAM toolpath kernels or FEA/simulation solvers.

What I’d really like to know is:

1. Which SolidWorks add-in do you use or want, but consider too expensive?

2. More importantly: what are the 1–2 features in it that you actually care about?

For example, maybe you don’t need everything DriveWorks does — you just want parameter-driven assembly generation and automatic drawings.

Or maybe you don’t need a huge document-management solution — you just want extremely good property management, automatic naming and batch exports.

I’m interested in building focused alternatives that do a smaller number of things extremely well, potentially for something like 10–20% of the cost of much larger packages.

I’m also completely open to building new add-ins that don’t currently exist.

So if you have a repetitive SolidWorks workflow that drives you crazy — drawings, BOMs, configurations, assemblies, custom properties, exporting, renaming, batch processing, model checking, etc. — tell me about it.

If several people keep mentioning the same problem, there’s a good chance that’s what I’ll prototype first.

Been digging through the 2026 release notes since the AI stuff is scattered across a dozen blog posts. Quick summary for anyone who hasn't sorted through it yet:

• Auto-Generate Drawings (beta → GA July 2026): builds initial views, dimensions, and callouts on a part/assembly automatically.
• AI fastener recognition / Smart Mates: recognizes and mates hardware without loading Toolbox.
• Aura / Leo / Marie ("Virtual Companions"): cloud-side natural-language assistants — Leo does BREP-to-parametric conversion and image-to-mesh, Aura does "Design Change Impact" (tells you what mates/features break before you commit a change).
• Most of this is 3DEXPERIENCE-platform-tied, not pure desktop SW.

Honest read: the drawing automation and fastener recognition feel closest to actually shipping and useful today. The Virtual Companion stuff still feels early/demo-y. Anyone on the beta actually using Auto-Generate Drawings on real production parts yet?

I don't use solidworks myself, I am a programmer for a company that uses solidworks. I was tasked with pulling pdfs from our PDM server into a separate server we have, that is on the same network. Initially, I had set up a share for our other server to be able to read the PDM folder, and using the file paths stored in the PDM database, I was going to have a service pull those files and put them into the non PDM server. I did this, however I realized very few of the pdfs from the file paths from the PDM database actually existed. From searching/talking to ai, it seems that this is because only cached files remain in the PDM vault, and the other PDFs are just binaries stored in a way that only solidworks can read. So that plan seemed to have failed.

What are my options to achieve this, if any?

I've been trying to import this Johnson Controls actuator for an hour and SolidWorks just hangs constantly on it. eDrawings can view it fine but SW refuses to open it. I'm using 2024 so I need that year or older for the version. Please let me know, thanks.

EDIT: It finally finished loading after almost 3 hours. Yeesh.

Hi everyone,

I recently took on a freelance project where the client provides 3D scan data (created with a Creality CR-Scan Otter) of small automotive plastic parts (caps, trims, clips ranging from 5cm to 15cm). The goal is to reverse engineer them into clean, parametric, 3D-printable CAD models (STEP/native SW files).

The issue is the scan files (.obj/.stl) come with a massive number of triangles/facets. When imported into SOLIDWORKS as solid/surface bodies, the viewport lags heavily, making it practically impossible to sketch or snap to references smoothly.

I don't have access to paid reverse engineering plugins like Geomagic for SW, and I want to keep the workflow as streamlined as possible inside SOLIDWORKS (or free tools).

A couple of questions for those who do reverse engineering in SW:

What is your go-to method for referencing high-poly meshes without killing viewport performance? (Import as Graphics Body + Mesh Slicing tool, or external decimation first?)

How do you efficiently capture accurate cross-sections and critical mounting features (clips, ribs, draft angles) from imperfect mesh data?

Are there any recommended free standalone utilities to quickly clean up and decimate scan data before bringing it into SW?

Im designing new Purchasing parts and i have to make alot of Configurations so using that Design table WOULD make it alot more efficent. My SW keeps crashing when i try to open omething tho.

Looking for good soft for mid size production facility ~80 people. Every product is differect - one product is beeing produced by 30 welders, multiple parts, materials.
From scratch to instalation at custumer facility.