Hi All,

The new SOLIDWORKS MBD manual is now available for purchase.  The course has been re-written to focus more on the MBD functions like using Annotation Views and 3D PDF publishing with DimXpert information being condensed into a single lesson. Since this is a new course and a fairly new product, I thought it might be nice to provide some instructor tips and a little bit of theory behind the course design and the MBD product.

In designing this course, I collaborated with Matt Lorono from the SOLIDWORKS Product Definition Team. He did a great presentation at SWW 2016 that provides some introductory information about MBD which includes some industry and drafting standard information.  You can find his presentation slides as an attachment to this post.

The other attachment that you’ll find is what I’ve labeled as Instructor Notes.  It provides a detailed summary of each lesson and example along with some NOTE areas to provide tips and additional info.  My hope is that this will be helpful in understanding the course layout and improve your understanding of the information provided in the manual.

TimeLine

SOLIDWORKS MBD is a 1 day course. The course consists of 6 lessons.  I’d suggest completing Lessons 1-4 in the morning session and Lessons 5-6 in the afternoon.

• Lesson 1 is a brief introduction to MBD with no exercises.
• Lesson 2 and 3 are standard length (~30-45 minutes) and include exercises. Annotation Views, 3D Views, and Publishing options are covered in these lessons.
• Lesson 4 is a relatively short demo on 3D PDF templates with no exercises.
  • NOTE:  there are supplemental video tutorials on this topic (and others) on My.SolidWorks.com that you or the students can access if desired.  This is also mentioned in the manual.
• Lesson 5, the DimXpert lesson, is rather long.  I’d recommend taking a break after the first case study about Auto Dimension Scheme.  Exercise 7 can be attempted by the students after this first case study; however there is one step about adding a Location Dimension.
• Lesson 6 is relatively short.