SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual Announced At SolidWorks World 2013

Today is the first day of SolidWorks World 2013 and as the SolidWorks CEO Bertrand Sicot promised back in September 2012 at the SolidWorks 2013 launch, the company today unveiled their direct modeling solution titled “SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual”. See “New V6 Based SolidWorks Conceptual Design Product“.

This is what it looks like.

Picture courtesy @RobRodriguez (click to enlarge)

Picture courtesy @SolidWorks (click to enlarge)

Unfortunately, there was no live demo. Just screenshots. I’m thinking if this is going to be released in May 2013 as was mentioned in September last year then by now a live demo should have been possible. After all everyone is looking at SolidWorks to actually deliver something based on the Dassault Systemes V6 technology.

From the tweets I gather that this is direct modeling conceptual designer and a one way data transfer to SolidWorks. So when you are done with your conceptual design in SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual you take the model into SolidWorks to continue with detail design.

Another interesting thing about this product is that it is stores data in the cloud. According to this blog post posted by CEO Bertrand Sicot on the SolidWorks blog:

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual is always connected to the design database and to other users… [snip]… Users are always working together on the same design so that there is no time wasted, or confusion as to what is the latest version.  When a team member makes a change, all users are updated in real time with the latest version so the concepts will always progress forward.

This is a nice way of getting SolidWorks users accustomed to working online and saving their data in the cloud away from their beloved hard drives. Looks like SolidWorks has realized that the “shock and awe” policy they used some SolidWorks World’s ago may not have been the best way to go about it. 😉

In reading the SolidWorks blog post I came across this:

In May of this year, we will be working with select customers to validate these principles of conceptual design in their production environments.  Once we are confident in the benefits these customers are seeing we expect to make SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual available to all users in the Fall of 2013.

So that’s at least 8 or 9 months away. No wonder attendees of SolidWorks World are being shown screenshots and not a live demo of SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual.