I have been out to a couple customers in the Dayton and Columbus area lately that are a little confused with the “new” way of adding a NEW (empty) part to an Assembly in SolidWorks 2008. First lesson to be learned here is, READ THE WHAT’S NEW MANUAL. If I didn’t KNOW about the new “Virtual Component” functionality in 2008, I would be confused too when I tried to do some top-down design !
Here is what it is… In SolidWorks 2007 (and before), when you were in an Assembly and choose INSERT–NEW PART it would ask you WHERE you wanted to save the file, and WHAT you wanted to call the file. At that point in time, it would physically CREATE a file on your hard drive named that. In SolidWorks 2008, when you choose INSERT–NEW PART, it just makes a NEW part INTERNALLY in the Assembly. NOTHING IS CREATED ON THE HARD DRIVE ! It shows up in the tree, you are put into Edit Part Mode, you pick a plane, a sketch is created on that plane, etc., everything just like before, EXCEPT it is just making a “Virtual Component” IN the assembly.
This is GREAT for situations when you don’t know IF you want to keep that part, if you don’t know WHAT you are eventually going to call that part, or WHERE you want to eventually save the part ! When you go to CLOSE the Assembly (or go to SAVE the assembly), it will ask you if you want to just save the PART FILES as “Virtual Components” IN the Assembly file, or if you PHYSICALLY want to save them out on the hard drive. It is completely fine to just let them “live” in the Assembly, especially
while you are in the design stages. The next time you open the Assembly they are still there to work on, PLUS you don’t have all of those part files taking up space on the hard drive !
As you are working on the Assembly you can do a slow double-click in the Assembly Tree on any of the Virtual Components to rename it as you decide what you want to call that part. Once the Assembly has been saved, you can right-click a Virtual Component (in the tree) and choose “Save Part (in External File)” at any time you wish to physically save the part to your hard drive. (I usually just let SolidWorks do all that for me at once when I go to save or close the assembly).
There is another GREAT benefit of the new Virtual Components in SolidWorks 2008. You can now have parts like “grease”, “paint”, and my co-worker Jeff Sweeney’s old favorite “pixie dust”, in your Assemblies without having to PHYSICALLY make “dummy” parts for this as in the past ! And yes, they are “parts” in the
Assembly, so they WILL show up in the Bill Of Materials. You would just leave them as Virtual Components forever.
Hope this helps clear up some of the “what’s wrong with SolidWorks 2008 and top-down Assembly modeling ??” that we have been hearing around the SolidWorks community and 3DVision territory.
For more information on this, see the “What’s New in 2008″ guide and of course the HELP file in 2008 (search for “Virtual Components”).

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under 3D CAD, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.