If you are in the pool design industry and you manufacture pool liners and covers there is a good chance you have heard of or are using PoolWorks. If you haven’t heard of PoolWorks then today is your lucky day, PoolWorks is innovative pool design software created by Javelin for the rapid creation of pool liners and covers at a fraction of the time of traditional methods. PoolWorks utilizes the simple, easy to use toolset of SOLIDWORKS combined with industry leading surface flattening technology from ExactFlat to get an accurate and tight fitting liner or cover everytime.
How does PoolWorks help you to create complex Custom Pools?
While PoolWorks has always been able to create and flatten any pool geometry, no matter how complex, I would like to take some time to go over a great new enhancement to the PoolWorks software, the Template Administrator, which allows you to create your own highly complex pool liners and save them as templates for quick and easy re-use and creation.
The Template Administrator
Here we have a Figure 8 Pool with a Safety Ledge, let’s see how we can use the new Template Administrator to save it as a Template.
Figure 8 Pool with Safety Ledge
First we need to start with a Dig Print or Perimeter Sketch of the pool, these can be sketched in SOLIDWORKS or can be dragged and dropped from your Custom Design Library in SOLIDWORKS
Dig Print for Figure 8 Pool
The next step is to create all the Pool geometry, this may seem like a long process but the average time is around 3 – 4 minutes. When we are finished with the Geometry creation we can navigate to the PoolWorks tab , in SOLIDWORKS, and click the Template Administrator button,
Turning Pool Geometry into a Template
Once the Template Administrator opens you will be prompted to name your pool and start adding driving dimensions that will control your template. You do this by clicking the dimensions that you want to be driving and clicking on the Add Selected Dimension, the software will then prompt you to name the dimension and add it to your template list. You can add Template Dimensions for the Pool and the Hopper as well.
Note : to view dimensions in the model window simply double click on the feature, in the feature tree, to which the dimension is attached
Add Driving Dimensions to your Template
With the Template Administrator you also have the ability to customize the image that is shown when it comes time to add dimensions to the template. Simply click on the image holder, above your selected template dimensions, and the image will be opened in paint. You can edit the image to your liking and save it for use with the template, this is useful for indicating which dimensions are driving which part of your pool model. You can edit an image for both Pool dimension displays as well as Hopper dimension displays.
Edit Display Image
Creating a new Pool design with a template
You are now ready to use the template with PoolWorks, we can now start a new pool and select Use Template.
Create a new Pool
We can then navigate to the project tab and enter our Project Number, Select our project scope and enter or import out Custom Properties.
Enter Project Information
When we proceed to the Pool Data tab we see a brand new folder structure where we can select our new custom template
New Template Folder Structure
Once our Template is selected we can enter all the measurements using our guide image that we customized during the template setup.
Enter values for our Custom Template
All that is left now is to set our shrink factor and press Create Pool
Create the Custom Pool
The custom pool is then created in seconds and is ready for flattening.
Custom Template Created Pool
Learn more about PoolWorks
The new PoolWorks Template Administrator makes complex pool design easy and drastically reduces the time from design to the cutting table. If you would like to learn more about Poolworks, get pricing, or request a demonstration please visit our PoolWorks site.
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