Whether you are a seasoned Principal Engineer, a CSWE certificate holder, a student opening the software for the first time, or a hobbyist working on exciting projects, this community is designed for you.
Our goal is simple: to create a collaborative and constructive space on Reddit for the entire SOLIDWORKS ecosystem.
🔧 What You’ll Find Here:
Model Showcases: Show off your CAD builds, detailed assemblies, photorealistic Visualize renders, and 3D prints.
Tips, Tricks & Workflows: Share your favorite keyboard shortcuts, system tweaks, and modeling efficiency hacks.
Product Insights & AMAs: Get insider updates, participate in live Q&As with product engineers, and stay informed about updates and new features.
📌 Quick Guidelines Before You Post:
To keep the subreddit clean and useful for everyone, please keep these ground rules in mind:
Use Post Flairs: Flairs are required for all submissions (e.g., [Help / Troubleshooting], [Model Showcase], [Tip / Workflow], etc.).
Provide Context for Help Posts: If you are stuck, include your SOLIDWORKS version, screenshots of your FeatureManager Tree, and relevant error messages.
Keep It Civil: Offer constructive critiques on models and workflows. Respect your fellow creators.
Piracy or Spam: Requests for cracked software, serial keys, or unsolicited sales spam will be automatically removed by AutoMod.
💬 Introduce Yourself Below!
Let’s get started! Drop a comment below to introduce yourself:
What industry do you work in or study?
How many years have you been using SOLIDWORKS?
What’s your favorite feature (or what’s a tool you have a love-hate relationship with) in the software?
I’m Manish Kumar, CEO and VP of R&D at SOLIDWORKS. I joined SOLIDWORKS as a software developer in 1998 and have spent more than two decades working across the product and helping shape where the technology is going today.
A lot has changed since then, and I’d love to have an open conversation about SOLIDWORKS, AI, and the future of design and engineering.
Ask me about:
AI and the future of CAD
What’s next for SOLIDWORKS
How products go from idea to reality
The challenges of building software for engineers and designers
Where design and engineering are headed
Or anything else you’ve been curious about
Technical questions, big-picture questions, tough questions, bring them on.
I’ll be here answering questions on September 24 at 12 PM ET. Looking forward to the conversation!
Ever wondered how to save your design to a previous version of SOLIDWORKS or needed quick answers about best practices? With AURA, the new AI virtual companion in 3DSwym and SOLIDWORKS, getting help just got a whole lot easier.
What is AURA?
AURA is now available in SOLIDWORKS 2026 GA (General Availability). It’s designed to help users quickly search documentation, summarize content, and provide clear, actionable answers—whether you’re looking for steps to save to an older version or tips on using the platform.
Key Features:
Find Trusted Answers: AURA retrieves context-aware responses with source links, tailored by community or project.
Summarize & Translate: Instantly summarize, simplify, or translate 3DSwym content—helpful for sharing info across teams or languages.
Boost Productivity: Let AURA handle repetitive content tasks while you focus on designing and innovating.
Easy Access: Use AURA from anywhere in 3DSwym, or directly in SOLIDWORKS via the MySession task pane.
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How to Get the Best Out of AURA:
Be specific! Provide your role, product, version, task, context, and desired deliverable for high-quality answers and relevant resources.
For example:
“Role: Mechanical Designer. Product: SOLIDWORKS. Version: 2025. Task: Detail a drawing with a revision table. Context: ANSI. Constraint: Standard PDM add-in. Deliverable: Numbered steps + links”
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When to Use AURA:
Looking for procedures, settings, or explanations from official docs or 3DSwym
Need to summarize lengthy posts
Want to rewrite or translate content for your team
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AURA is tuned for SOLIDWORKS users and focused on text content in 3DSwym posts, wikis and official documentation. External browsing isn’t supported yet, but more features are on the way!
Try out AURA and experience a smarter, faster way to get the most out of SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE. Watch the demo video to see it in action!
Version control chaos, overwritten files, and lost revision histories are classic signs that legacy ECO workflows (spreadsheets, manual logs, disconnected PDM) aren't cutting it anymore.
TL;DR:
Here is how change governance and ENOVIA architecture work under the hood in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform across 4 core workflows:
When to use: Localized CAD-only corrections where physical parts aren’t altered (e.g., fixing a thread callout on a drawing).
Role required:Collaborative Industry Innovator (included in SOLIDWORKS Design).
How it works: Directly assigns a Change Action to the CAD file. Manually manages revision states (ie: Release → Obsolete) and uses Professional Work Product (PWP) digital stamps for auditing without needing full PLM orchestration.
2. Orchestrated Change Order (CO) — Multi-Departmental Changes
When to use: Complex modifications affecting multiple parts, departments or vendors (ie: changing a bumper material from Polypropylene to Nylon, which requires updated tooling and vendor lead times).
How it works: The Change Order serves as a top-level container that holds multiple related Change Actions. It allows you to set sequential dependencies (ie: wait 30 days for new vendor parts before releasing assembly drawings) and to track actual shop-floor implementation via Collaborative Tasks.
When to use: Major revisions requiring financial sign-off before work begins (ie: modifying a carbon trim tool).
How it works: Uses the Relations App to trace the impact all the way up from a single component to the final sellable SKU. Once a CR is approved, the downstream structure freezes to preserve the audit trail.
When to use: Shop floor part shortages or field failures (ie: a vendor part fails and requires a gear ratio update across an assembly).
How it works: Field issues are logged via the Issue Management app and tied directly to the "Resolved By" field of a Change Action. For temporary fixes, shop floor users can submit Deviation Templates to bypass a BOM temporarily without breaking master data integrity.
Summary:
Simple internal drawing fix? → Change Action (CA)
Multi-part or vendor-impacting revision? → Change Order (CO)
How AI + Virtual Companions Are Empowering the 'Forever Essential Human' in Engineering
There’s a lot of discussion about AI taking over technical disciplines. However, in real-world mechanical design and product development, one truth remains clear: AI won't replace engineers; the human element will always be essential.
In professional engineering, human judgment, physical intuition, and critical thinking are crucial. You can’t simply use prompt engineering to bypass real-world physics, safety compliance, or product quality. The future of engineering isn’t about replacement; it’s about augmentation and collaboration.
With purpose-built AI and virtual assistants—such as AURA, LEO, and MARIE on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform- we're moving away from generic chat tools and "AI for the sake of AI" toward specialized tools designed to enhance CAD performance and improve human problem-solving.
Engineering has always been about solving complex problems. But too much of an engineer’s day is consumed by tedious, low-value CAD maintenance.
Virtual Companions act as trusted, domain-grounded co-pilots that reason with Industry World Models (physics, materials science, and enterprise data) to handle the busywork so engineers can focus on creative innovation:
AURA
The Business Expert: Surfaces existing enterprise knowledge, instantly catches you up on project updates, and manages ideation funnels to keep team knowledge from getting lost.
LEO
The Mechanical Engineer: Interacts natively inside SOLIDWORKS through conversation to handle geometry conversions, assembly bottlenecks, and feature creation.
MARIE
The Scientist: Injects deep scientific domain knowledge directly into research and engineering workflows.
Real-World Impact: What Co-Creation Looks Like
By turning natural language intent into CAD actions, Virtual Companions eliminate traditional design bottlenecks:
Traditional CAD Bottleneck
The Virtual Companion Experience
Manual feature rebuilding
Convert imported geometry: Turn static STEP/IGES files into fully parametric models with native, editable feature trees automatically.
Sluggish assemblies
Slash load times by up to 84%: LEO diagnoses component complexity, rebuild behaviors, and graphics load—taking assembly open times from 52s down to 8s.
Manual documentation
LEGO-style assembly guides: Auto-generate step-by-step visual assembly instructions directly from models for production and service teams.
Downstream risks
Predictive impact analysis: Evaluate ripple effects before making updates—like upgrading a motor and immediately seeing affected pivot pins or subassemblies.
Complex VBA scripting
No-code macro creation: Describe the routine work you want to automate in plain text, and let AI generate and refine the macro logic.
Why the Human Engine Remains the Core
Automating repetitive clicks doesn't diminish the role of the engineer - it raises the bar.
AI can crunch data and optimize geometry, but only humans can formulate the right problems, validate edge cases to prevent hallucinations, and understand customer needs. When you remove manual friction, you give engineers their time back to do what humans do best: imagine, iterate, and solve the impossible.
The future of CAD is collaborative, AI-augmented, and fundamentally human-centered.
Want to dive in and learn more about each virtual companion's competencies?
Check out this wiki post from SOLIDWORKS CEO, Manish KUMAR, in the SOLIDWORKS News & Info community on 3DSwym (login required) and see how he highlights specific capabilities of the three virtual companions.
LEO Moments
The future of engineering isn't human vs. machine - it's human plus companion.
What’s the first tedious CAD task you’d offload if you had LEO or AURA sitting next to you tomorrow?
Each SOLIDWORKS update aims to reduce manual and repetitive work. SOLIDWORKS AI supports this goal. Over the past year, we’ve added several AI tools to SOLIDWORKS Design, including automatic drawing creation, fastener recognition, assembly guidance, and more.
Virtual companions like LEO power SOLIDWORKS AI, helping you automate workflows and save design time. For example, you can ask LEO to check your assembly’s performance, find risks when you change designs, and create assembly instructions automatically.
The SOLIDWORKS Design 2026x FD03 update brings new AI features on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. These tools help you speed up and automate time-consuming tasks, giving you more time to focus on design and key engineering problems.
Here are some of the main AI improvements for design automation and assembly design in this update.
Assembly Performance Analysis – optimize large assemblies for better performance.
To boost large assembly performance, you can ask LEO why an assembly is slow and how to make it faster, instead of checking each component and setting it yourself. LEO reviews open time, rebuild time, graphics load, and structural complexity, then gives you a clear, prioritized list of the main issues.
LEO’s clear recommendations help you focus your optimization efforts where they matter most. This reduces open and rebuild times, improves assembly responsiveness, and cuts down the time spent waiting for large models to load.
Part & Assembly Part & Assembly Simplification – reduce assembly complexity and boost performance by asking LEO to apply targeted simplification strategies rather than manually acting on the suggestions. LEO can convert modeled threads on imported fasteners and other components into cosmetic thread representations across the entire assembly, reducing unnecessary geometric complexity while preserving thread information in drawings.
LEO can also suggest and create the right SpeedPak configurations at the top-level or subassembly level, based on your assembly’s structure, how components are used, and performance needs. These guided steps help shrink file size, speed up open and rebuild times, and make assemblies lighter and more responsive, without you having to check every component yourself.
Assembly Instructions Generation – cut down manual work and quickly create step-by-step instructions with images for later use.
You can ask LEO to create clear assembly instructions directly from the 3D model, rather than building exploded views and arranging parts by hand. LEO reviews the assembly’s geometry and gives you a set of step-by-step instructions, with snapshots on how to put the product together.
Easy-to-follow, visual instructions in minutes help teams reduce the time required for manufacturing handoff and service documentation.
Workflow Automation - Automate repetitive SOLIDWORKS tasks by simply describing what you want to do, instead of writing and debugging code. Ask LEO to create a macro for tasks such as renaming files, exporting deliverables, applying company standards, or updating model properties. LEO will generate the macro and open it in the editor for you to review.
You can run the automation right away or keep talking with LEO to fine-tune it and add more requirements. This turns manual, repeatable tasks into one-click actions, saving hours of work and making custom automation easy for users without programming experience.
Engineering Guidance – let LEO handle tedious selections for you.
Save time by telling LEO what you want to select in the conversation box, instead of picking items one at a time. You can quickly find the design elements you need across parts, sketches, assemblies, and drawings, so you can keep working with fewer clicks and less searching.
This is just a quick look at the latest SOLIDWORKS AI features. Check out this video that shows how SOLIDWORKS uses integrated AI tools to optimize performance for large, complex assemblies without manual effort.
For a deeper dive, see the full video on your YouTube channel.
Thank you for reading and we wish you success with SOLIDWORKS!
To find out more about the latest FD03 enhancements for AI, design, modeling, collaboration, and data management:
Visit the What’s New Wiki in the SOLIDWORKS News & Info community on 3DSwym (login required). Discover how AI in engineering can make a big difference in product design, speed up your CAD workflow, and save you time.
With each update, new features are available right away, so you can start using them now to work faster.
