I want to estimate how long it would take me to learn Solidworks.
If I use the tutorials that come with the program and a good Solidworks book, and spend 8 hours a day teaching myself, how many days do you think it would take me?
I’ve never used the program before. I know Autocad well.
Thanks for any info.
The SW tutorials don’t teach you very much, unfortunately, if you are going to do surface modelling and lofting operations.
My advice is to whip through the tutorials as quickly as possible, concentrating especially on how to add relations. Most of the solid tools should be pretty similar to stuff that’s easy to do in AC. After that, forget everything you just learned, and use the 3D sketch tools until you’re proficient with them. Then use the surface tools until you’ve learned them. SW is a bitch about stable geometry and it doesn’t exactly tell you why something isn’t working beyond giving you vague error messages, so don’t expect to master it immediately. If you spent 8-hours a day on it, you could probably be pretty good by the end of the summer.
Thank you SW fiend,
I really need to use SW to sketch in 3D with, and to produce renderings of those sketches to explain concepts. Quite a basic level - I was wondering if I could reach this level in a couple of weeks. What do you think?
That depends entirely on what you’re sketching. If your sketches show extruded forms and other fairly simple, linear shapes, it can be done. More complex forms with non-planar, non-linear shapes, I am afraid, will take longer to learn how to construct and will require the 3d sketching tools and surface modeling tools. That will take a long time and you’ll never really finish learning the software.