SOLIDWORKS is easy to use. I’m sure you’re not surprised at that statement. At this point, that’s common knowledge. Ease of use has been in its DNA from day one back in 1995. Although it is easy to use, it’s still one of the most powerful CAD applications on the market. To make that possible there are countless commands that enable modeling flexibility that has solidified SOLIDWORKS place as the go-to application for various industries from manufacturing, to medical devices and the Department of Defense. Buried in all that flexibility for modeling are some options that are probably missed even though they have been staring you in the face from day one. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we share an option in the patterning commands that you might have missed, the geometry pattern command.

This option is a checkbox that could be turned on or off. When this option is turned on (checked) as the name suggests, the geometry will be patterned. What this means is that the geometry of the seed (the feature) will be patterned the desired number of times. When this option is cleared (turned off) the feature itself will be patterned. So, the difference is in the geometry. Sometimes there is no difference between the two options because it is an explicit command. An example of this would be an extrude that is set to a blind length. An explicit feature on the other hand, is something like an offset from surface command. This offset would need to be calculated for each of the instances of the pattern. As you can imagine this has significant implications on the performance and rebuild times of your model. 

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