SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional 2021 – Configurations from SOLIDWORKS

One important new feature to Visualize 2021 is the ability to import Configurations from SOLIDWORKS 2021. This new feature didn’t get much love in the 2021 What’s New documentation, but I am here to remedy that today.

First, this addition is connected to model sets, which is part SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional only; You will need to upgrade if you are using the free (with SOLIDWORKS Subscription) version of Visualize Standard to take advantage of Configurations.

Configurations from SOLIDWORKS come into Visualize as model sets. It’s pretty simple to get them in too, and if you only need a couple configurations from an assembly or part that has several, you simply need to “Add Display Mark” on the corresponding SOLIDWORKS configuration before importing to Visualize.

No additional setup is necessary. Import the model to visualize with the buttons in SOLIDWORKS, or using the Open command in Visualize, and simple as that, all your configuration goodness comes across just as you would expect them.

Remember too that Visualize Professional also has its own sets of Configurations. So, this means that you can have different variations of Color Configurations for each SOLIDWORKS Configuration, so no need to bring in all those derived configurations from SOLIDWORKS.

One last thing to note is that this functionality is specific only to SOLIDWORKS 2021 and Visualize 2021 Professional. This means that if you have old models that you would like to import into visualize with configurations, you will need to save the models with the display data mark in SOLIDWORKS 2021 first, before the data will be available in Visualize 2021 Professional.

Alex Worsfold
Sr. Application Engineer
www.cati.com