SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts

In SolidWorks 2010, a new tab, Evaluate, appears on the default Command Manager. You can use

the commands on this tab to evaluate parts in several ways. Some focus on plastic parts or thin

walled parts or symmetric parts, and so on. Most of these tools are from the Tools toolbar, but are

found on the Evaluate tab in the Command Manager.

Using Verification on rebuild

Verification on rebuild is an option that you can access by choosing Tools ➪ Options ➪ Performanc

e ➪ Verification on rebuild. Under normal circumstances (with this setting turned off), SolidWorks

checks each face to ensure that it does not overlap or intersect improperly with every adjacent face.

Each face can have several neighbors. This option is shown in Figure 11.7.

FIGURE 11.7

The Verification on rebuild option

With the setting selected, SolidWorks checks each face with every other face in the model. This is a

better check than with the setting off but greatly increases the workload. The switch is deselected by

default to prevent rebuild times from getting out of control. For most parts, the default setting is suf-

ficient; however, when parts become complex, you may need to select the more advanced setting.

If you are having geometry or rebuild error problems with a part and cannot understand why, then

try turning Verification on rebuild on and pressing Ctrl+Q. Ctrl+Q applies the Forced Rebuild

command, and rebuilds the entire design tree. Ctrl+B, or the Rebuild command, only rebuilds

what SolidWorks determines needs to be rebuilt.

If you see additional errors in the design tree that were not there before, then the combination of

Verification on rebuild and Forced Rebuild has identified problem areas of the model and the fea-

tures that caused the errors failed. If not, then your problem may be elsewhere. You still need to fix

any errors found this way.

Performance
For speed reasons, it is normal practice to turn Verification on rebuild off, and to use it selectively to check
models with potential errors. The type of speed degradation that you can see is dependent on the number of
faces in the model. Some of the performance degradation as relates to patterns is documented in Chapter 8. n