I was being invited to participate in a slightly longer xDesign challenge. During the last week of March, I received another email from Divi. While I was at SOLIDWORKS World 2018, I made a point of seeking out Divi Lohiya, the Product Program Manager for xDesign, to let him know of my eagerness to continue working with the xDesign Lighthouse team. Unfortunately, life got in the way at that point and I was unable to complete my challenge submission, but I was totally hooked on xDesign. Following that, I started brainstorming on my contest entry – a robot gripper hand (how prescient of me if you’ve read the previous articles in this series). This part requires a good range of sketch and modeling features to successfully create its final geometry. Next, I advanced to building my standard “go to” model when trying out a new CAD application, a cast metal part from one of my drafting textbooks. I immediately waded in by modeling up some simple parts, multi-body components and assemblies to get a feel for the tools and the interface. We were given a brief 20-minute webinar on the guidelines for the challenge but no xDesign demo or tutorial – one thing the development team wanted to see was how intuitively we could adapt to using it. Our resulting models would be showcased during a segment of the third day general session.

Flash forward to the week before SOLIDWORKS World 2018, and I get an email, out of the blue, inviting me to join a small group of participants in a mini design challenge using xDesign. And then, I heard nothing much for the next 18 months. I kept tabs on xDesign news for the next few months and noted a few user group meetings (mostly on the east coast) where xDesign demos were presented. I don’t think Gian Paolo Bassi had even left the stage by the time I had registered on the beta sign-up website from my tablet during the General Session. I had played with other cloud CAD offerings but, being a diehard SOLIDWORKS user, I was holding out for its solution. Like many others, I was very excited by the announcement of SOLIDWORKS xDesign at SOLIDWORKS World 2016 in Dallas.

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