Hello, my name is Diego Perez, and I recently joined the amazing product management team at Dassault Systèmes this past December. I am currently a product portfolio manager and work with the DraftSight desktop solutions, including DrafSight, DraftSight Mechanical and cloud-connected solutions like 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight and 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight Mechanical, in addition to other 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions.

I am really enjoying the pride that’s put into our solutions, based on the expertise of our team, and of course from the feedback from you all, the user community.

I have an update for you on some of the latest features in DraftSight solutions, but first wanted to provide some background on me.

So about me: I am 37, am Guatemalan, and I was born and raised in Rhode Island, New England where I received my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. I studied engineering because I was always tinkering with electronics at a young age, such as VCRs, (videocassette recorder players for playing movies- FYI for the youngsters) and remote control cars. When I discovered computer-aided design (CAD) I just fell in love with the concept of design using technology.

I’ve been in the industry for 12 years, and have experience as a sales engineer, as a CAD designer, and have been working with product development and applications for the last seven years.

What else? I’m a huge car guy. I don’t think I could be an engineer without loving cars. I’m a huge fan of BMW, particularly the M series model and enjoy working and driving my X3 and X6 SUVs.

I’m also proficient in SOLIDWORKS, and just got my certifications in DraftSight and Collaborative Designer for SOLIDWORKS. These certifications have really helped me become skilled in both solutions, but I’m going to brag and say I’m an expert now, and I’m eager to use both solutions to the fullest for future projects and share my knowledge with you all. And I’d highly encourage you to get your certifications to get the most out of our solutions.

But, enough about me, I’m just excited to meet you all, but more excited about sharing what’s new and important to you: design. And I want to be sure you are aware of the latest solutions and features available to you.

The latest update of 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight (Professional, Premium and Mechanical), R2024 functional delivery (FD01) now includes a new View Navigation Manager for templates, which is essentially a template management tool.

The purpose of this tool is to streamline the production of drawings so the Manage Templates menu has been enhanced so you can develop your drawings and then store them in templates on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and easily access them for re-use and/or share within your organization.

This feature will help you save time when creating standard items in drawings, all while providing a central platform for distributing and sharing DraftSight templates.

This year we have just scratched the surface of what’s to come, but last year we did a number of enhancements throughout the year, including the following: (for both DraftSight Desktop and 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight 2024)

•       Support for CATIA drawings– import CATIA model drawings from a local disk or the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. When you import a CATIA drawing you can expect it to behave as any other DWG file so you can easily edit the drawing.

•       Tool Palette Customization–designed toaccelerate drawing creation and ensure consistency. The tool palettes in DraftSight enable you to find all your frequently used commands and features in one place. The customization extends to predefined settings including layer, color, and line type and ensures all newly created entities conform to the pre-defined standards across drawings.

•       Export Sheet Command – rapidly create new drawings from existing files without loss of detail. With the new Export Sheet command, you can export all visible entities from an active sheet viewport and entities from the sheets to the new drawing.

To see the top 10 enhancements see my colleague Stephen Endersby’s blog here.

For those of you not using the cloud-connected versions of DraftSight, such as 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight, the installation is local, but enables you to extend your data on the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform and take advantage of its collaboration and data management capabilities.

Both DraftSight Mechanical Desktop and 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight Mechanical are the most recent additions to the DraftSight portfolio, which were brought on by customer demand back in the fall of 2022. The solutions are purpose-built to work with mechanical entities and objects in the DWG file format. With DraftSight Mechanical you can read and modify part references and modify bill of materials (BOM) previously created with other 2D mechanical tools, as well as create new part references and BOMs. It also has support for national and international standards for ANSI, ISO, DIN, JIS and BSI. Learn more this  blog here.

Also, R2024x FD01 dropped this month in the midst of 3DEXPERIENCE World mania, and the update is available now!

Ask your local reseller for a full demo to see more. And just an FYI: an added benefit is the cloud-connected solutions have multiple updates throughout the year so stay tuned, and please be sure to share feedback and suggestions of what you’d like to see with us and your local resellers. Feel free to say hello or drop a comment or suggestion in the comment thread below.

3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight and 3DEXPERIENCE DraftSight Mechanical are available as “roles” in the 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio. For more information visit https://www.solidworks.com/product/3dexperience-draftsight.

Diego Perez

Diego Perez is a Product Portfolio Manager who joined Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS in December of 2023. He is from Rhode Island and has a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with 12 years of experience in the industry, including sales/cost engineering, CAD design, and software development and applications. When Diego is not working, you can catch him sporting Nike, working out, bowling, and hanging with his dog Snowball.