Bridging the Worlds of 2D and 3D CAD Design

SUMMARY

As manufacturers rapidly transition from 2D to 3D CAD in today’s digital world, designers are demanding 3D to enhance their designs and improve communication. From websites to rapid prototyping, customers, designers, and engineers now depend on the latest 3D modeling tools. In this paper, we highlight the advantages of designing with SolidWorks® 3D CAD software as well as explaining how to leverage your existing 2D CAD data once you have decided to go 3D.

Introduction

Advantages of 3D CAD

As you work with 3D CAD software, you will quickly discover that 3D enhances not only the design process, but also communication with your customers and design team. Following are the main advantages of using SolidWorks 3D CAD:

Enhance visualization and communication
CAD is all about communicating ideas. We live in a 3D world, so we visualize objects in the same way. When it comes to communicating a design, we naturally prefer a 3D image, model, or animation over a 2D technical drawing. In the 2D world, designers must be able to look at three or four views of a design and mentally combine them in order to visualize what that design will look like in 3D.

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