SOLIDWORKS 2016 Service Pack 3 is now available for Early Visibility. We wanted to give you a look at some of the user interface changes that will be available as part of SP03.

The first thing to notice is the addition of an “Icon color” setting in System Options. This setting has two choices, Default and Classic. When you select Classic, a tooltip is displayed to let you know about a new “Background” (formerly “Interface brightness”) choice as well:

Selecting both Classic and Medium Light takes you from this:

To this:

The grey background (Medium Light) is the same RGB value as was used in SOLIDWORKS 2014 and 2015. And you see some familiar colors in some of the icons. Not every icon changes with the Classic setting. The classic coloring is applied to the most frequent and visible modeling features (solid features, surfaces, sheet metal, weldments, mold tools). Here’s the Surfaces toolbar:

And here’s a FeatureManager Design Tree showing both solid and surface features:

Some changes in the FeatureManager Design Tree include:

• Blue part icons, changed from grey.
• Hidden components, bodies, and features like curves, reference geometry, etc. use “wireframe” icons, with black text (like in 2015 and earlier). The slash (\) is gone.
• Suppressed items remain greyed out, with grey text

Here’s a small screenshot showing a resolved component (Blue part icon, normal text), a hidden component (wireframe part icon, normal text), and a suppressed component (greyed out icon and greyed out text):

Things we are still working on, but are not in SP3, include the crosshair cursor in sketches, and the midpoint selection issue. Work on those are in progress, and we will share updates soon.

Thank you for all of the feedback so far.   We will continue to listen and make changes based on your feedback.

UPDATE: Please see the following post for additional changes coming in SOLIDWORKS 2016 SP04 and SOLIDWORKS 2017: