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New in Solidworks 2012 is a tool that allows you to take charge of your models and give you time back in your busy schedule. How many of us work with import bodies, large data sets, or complex models? We find ourselves waiting for the model to rebuild multiple times for features or parts we’re simply working around for our design. SolidWorks has come up with a solution. “Freeze” is a new SolidWorks Feature Manager tool for SolidWorks 2012. It allows you to lock down items in the feature manager that are no longer changing and therefore don’t need to be rebuild on every model change.
How to turn on Freeze in SolidWorks 2012:
The yellow freeze bar appears near the top of the Feature Manager design tree, under the part name.
The freeze bar controls the point at which a part’s Feature Manager design tree rebuilds. Features above the freeze bar are frozen – you cannot edit them, and they are excluded from rebuilds of the model. Freezing a portion of a model can be useful if you work with complex models with many features. Freezing the features helps to:
Feature Freeze prevents the geometry of frozen features from being rebuilt. However, you might still experience long rebuild times due to other processes that are not addressed by Feature Freeze. Examples of potentially time-consuming processes not addressed by Feature Freeze:
To freeze features:


The freeze bar shortcut menu provides commands for moving the freeze bar, controlling rebuilds, and controlling part rebuild indicators. Right-click the freeze bar to access these commands:
The example used for this test was an injection mold. As you can see the rebuilt time saved was ~1 minute and 20 seconds. Multiply that by the number of changes and/or features added per day needed to complete this project. The settings for the Freeze bar are recognized by the Statistics option to give you a good indication of where you stand.
There are times when certain changes might cause frozen features to become out of date. There are safe guards against this causing problems with your design. Examples:
Rebuild Indicator
Out-of-date frozen features are flagged with a rebuild indicator
. When the part is a component of an assembly, you can control whether thebrebuild indicator propagates up the FeatureManager design tree. In the part containing the frozen features, right-click the freeze bar and click:
| Hide Part Rebuild Indicators | Stops the rebuild indicator |
Update Frozen Features
To update out-of-date frozen features, right-click the freeze bar and click:
| Update Frozen Features | Rebuilds out-of-date frozen features and their dependent features and returns them to the frozen state. Also rebuilds active features if deemed necessary by the SolidWorks application. |
If the part containing the frozen features has multiple configurations, you can control whether all configurations or only the active configuration are updated. Right-click the freeze bar and click:
| Always Update All Configurations | When selected, rebuilds all configurations when you click Update Frozen Features. When cleared, rebuilds only the active configuration when you click Update Frozen Features. |
| Update All Configurations | Rebuilds all configurations regardless of any other settings. |
So don’t waste your time waiting for rebuilds on items you’re not working with. Let SolidWorks “Freeze” them.
***
This post is courtesy of Jerald Staley. Jerald is an Elite Application Engineer and a Certified SolidWorks Expert at DASI Solutions, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations throughout Michigan and Indiana. He is a regular contributor to the DASI Solutions Blog.
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