Designing Buildings in SolidWorks

In my last post titled “What is Dassault Systemes Live Buildings?” I mentioned an email that I received from a reader who wanted to know more about the Live Buildings that Dassault Systemes has been talking about. In that email he wrote, “We use for special buildings for modeling and estimating SolidWorks and like the work with it very much.” I found it rather astounding that someone was using a history based parametric MCAD system like SolidWorks to design buildings. I asked him to send screen shots of buildings that he had designed in SolidWorks. This is what he sent me. Notice the feature/assembly tree on the left. Click the image for a larger view.

This is a model of a building that contains a number of sub-assemblies which I assume describe various parts of the building.

I don’t know how many of you have see something like this before. But I find this absolutely awesome. I bet the people who founded SolidWorks didn’t imagine that their software would be used this way.