SolidWorks Time Machine

One of my favorite things about SolidWorks is the Feature Manager design tree, or The Time Machine, as my little son calls it.  It may not seem like a big deal to some, but for me it has become one of the best learning aids I have found so far. Why? Well, simply because it contains all the information about the model history: the sketches, relations between the different entities, what features and how they were created, equations, etc.   Thanks to the Feature Manager, I can “go back in time” and see, step by step, how a model was made, simply by rolling it back all the way to the beginning, and then rolling down feature by feature. I can also edit features and sketches and see the geometry and options that were selected in order to achieve a particular result. In this image, for instance, you can see how I rolled back the model to just after the first feature, Revolve 1. Notice how Cut-Extrude1 and Sweep1 appear as if they had been suppressed, and in the graphics window appears the model as it was when Revolve1 was the only feature created.

But trying to decipher the history of a model was a bit confusing at first, to tell the truth. The features in the design tree aren’t necessarily displayed in the same order they were originally created. Besides the fact that SolidWorks allows you to reorder features in the design tree, thus changing the history of the model,   most features (like extrude, revolve, sweep, etc.) consume the sketches they were created from. This means that the sketch is now displayed under the feature, in whatever order it was created, even if the sketch itself was created much earlier in the history of the model.

As an illustration of what was mentioned above, in the following images, notice how the sketches are not displayed in the right order in which they were created. In Sweep1, the two sketches are displayed in the order in which they were selected when creating the sweep, so it would appear as if Sketch3 was created before Sketch2. Furthermore, in the second image, Cut-Extrude1 has been moved from the bottom of the tree to just in between Revolve1 and Sweep1,  making it look as if both, Cut-Extrude1 and Sketch4, had been created earlier when, in fact, they were created last in the history of the model.

                                        

Things can get really confusing in large design trees, especially if the features have been renamed.

Although I still believe the design tree to be one of the best and most useful things I have found in SolidWorks, many times I do wish there was an optional way to display the design tree differently, so it would reflect the real chronological history of the model. I think such design tree would make it a lot easier to understand how the different sketches and features in the model are related to each other. It would be nice, but while there isn’t any (at least not without playing complicated tricks with the rollback bar), I’ll keep practicing my editing techniques. I think I’m getting the hang of it!