Toby's Position On Solidworks Contour Select

AircraftJunkie | Oct. 24, 2023, 3:33 p.m.

Contour select has evolved a lot in SW, and so my position on it has evolved as well.  I used to be a lot more cautious about using it, but now I'm pretty confident in it's functionality and find myself using it more and more often, for production work.

It's great to be able to layout a bunch of useful elements of the design, all in 1 sketch.

The one thing to avoid is making a sketch TOO COMPLICATED.  The "keep your sketches simple" mantra should always be remembered, and is especially important for newer users.

Overly complicated sketches are both a nightmare to troubleshoot, and can cause a significant performance hit to SolidWorks, because of how sketch solving works (specificially with regards to endpoint merging).

So, in summary, if there are several features that make sense to be "designed together" because of dependencies, I have no problem suggesting the use of contour selection and shared sketches.  But if there's no clear reason/benefit, then making simple sketches, "one for each feature" is probably a sound strategy.