Hi All,

I was hoping to get some community wisdom from you all: sorry in advance for the long post.

Recently I have noticed a lot of furniture companies are making the move or have already made the move to SOLIDWORKS. Being heavily involved with a range of different companies in this industry myself I’d be interested to see what the community’s opinion is on the use of SOLIDWORKS for furniture design.

I have four main areas of interest:

Furniture work flows:

I think currently the general consensus of furniture SOLIDWORKS users are multi-body modelling and using weldment cut-list rather than standard assembly modelling and BOMs. Whilst I can see the benefits and down sides of both. I’d be greatly interested in peoples experience with this and for what reason you have chosen or would recommend a specific workflow.

On top of this the use of smart components and Library features seems like a no-brainier when it comes to furniture but would be greatly interested in other features in SOLIDWORKS that can be used to speed up and improve the standard process.

Visualization

Everybody loves a good render! Whilst I’m aware of the Visualize post on the forum with some absolutely amazing renders and a few furniture related renders. How many people out there are actually using Visualize – (or other software’s) – to create realistic furniture images for customers, websites ect.. and also any struggles you have found in doing so.

Manufacturing

Obviously many furniture companies will manufacture in-house. I have seen many long winded work flows, of users saving out individual DXFs sorting into materials or groups then apply tool paths in different software or manually nesting components in SOLIDWORKS and then saving out as DXFs to import onto the machine. Taking user a needlessly long time. Does anyone here have similar experiences, a more improved work flow or any third party software’s to speed this up?

Composer

Lastly in my mind composer fits extremely well with furniture – many might disagree. Is anyone out there using composer in connection with furniture design – I would be interested to hear your opinions on this. Any examples of this would also be great to see shared.

Thanks in advance – I look forward to hearing everyone’s views