Blog SOLIDWORKS 2018 What’s New – Auto-Rotate View on Sketch Edit – #SW2018
SOLIDWORKS 2018 What’s New – Auto-Rotate View on Sketch Edit – #SW2018
SOLIDWORKS 2018 has lots of exciting enhancements. Some of this new functionality will benefit everyone, while other enhancements might be applicable to specific industries. Here is a small enhancement that will prove to be a large time saver for all SOLIDWORKS users.
In recent SOLIDWORKS releases, starting a new sketch will automatically rotate your model view. It positions your model so that the active sketch plane is “Normal To” our view. This orientation makes it much easier to snap and capture relations as you sketch. This occurring automatically saves us a click every time we start a new sketch.
In SOLIDWORKS 2018, this functionality has been enhanced. It will now automatically rotate “Normal To” when we edit existing sketches, too.
These videos below show an example of this enhancement. This can be observed by creating a new sketch and then editing the existing sketch. For the comparison, we will do these steps in SOLIDWORKS 2017 and SOLIDWORKS 2018.
In the 2017 release, a new sketch is created on the circular face. The model immediately rotates “Normal To” so that we are looking directly into the face that we are sketching on. After the single hole is created, this same sketch is edited. Notice that the model maintains its current position. We must click on the view tool to get the part to orient so that we are, again, looking directly into the active sketch.
In SOLIDWORKS 2018, the model will still rotate “Normal To” when we create the new sketch for the hole. Now, in SOLIDWORKS 2018, editing an existing sketch will also rotate the model “Normal To”.
I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2018. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2018. All of these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.” You can also learn more about SOLIDWORKS 2018 by clicking on the image below to register for one of CATI’s Design Innovation Summits.
Greg Buter
Application Engineer
