EngineeringMechanical EngineeringStandards
SOLIDWORKS Materials, Drafting Standards & Units
Materials, drafting standards, units and line conventions determine whether the numbers on a drawing are trustworthy and whether two engineers’ documentation looks like it came from the same organisation. This layer’s failures are quiet — they surface in a lifting plan, a supplier query, or an audit.
- Group · Standards
- Series · Administration
- Baseline · SOLIDWORKS 2026
- Reading · 16 min
01 The Third Layer of Standards
Templates carry document settings and libraries carry components. The third layer — materials, drafting standards, units and line conventions — determines whether the numbers on a drawing are trustworthy and whether two engineers' documentation looks like it came from the same organisation.
This layer is the most often neglected because its failures are quiet. A material with a wrong density produces a mass that nobody questions until a lifting calculation is done against it. A drafting standard left at the installation default produces drawings whose dimension and tolerance presentation does not match the standard the business claims to work to. Units left inconsistent between templates produce a bill of materials with masses in mixed systems.
None of these announce themselves. They surface in a lifting plan, a supplier query, or an audit.
File extensions and the mechanics of external standards files are stable across releases; interface locations change. Material property values supplied with the application are indicative and are not a substitute for verified data from a supplier or a published standard where the value carries engineering consequence.
02 Material Databases
Structure
Materials are held in libraries. A supplied library ships with the application and is read-only; custom libraries are separate files that can be created, edited and placed in a controlled location. The supplied library cannot be edited, which is a useful constraint — it means a custom library is not an optional refinement but the only way to hold your own material definitions.
Custom library files live wherever the corresponding file location setting points, which makes them deployable through the settings file in the administrative image in exactly the same way as templates. The same rule applies: one controlled location, referenced identically, locked, with write access restricted.
| Property | Consumed by | Consequence of an error |
|---|---|---|
| Density | Mass properties, bill of materials mass, centre of gravity | Incorrect lifting, shipping and structural inputs — the highest-consequence error in this layer |
| Elastic and shear modulus | Structural analysis | Deflection and stress results wrong by a proportional factor |
| Yield and tensile strength | Analysis factor of safety, design checks | Factor of safety reported against the wrong allowable |
| Thermal properties | Thermal analysis, expansion calculations | Thermal results and clearance calculations invalid |
| Material name | Bill of materials, title block, purchasing | Procurement against an ambiguous or non-existent specification |
| Appearance and hatch | Shaded display, section hatching on drawings | Section views that do not convey material to the reader |
| Custom properties on the material | Bill of materials columns, cut lists | Blank or inconsistent columns in issued documentation |
Density is the property most consumed and least questioned. It flows into every mass figure the business produces, and those figures are used for lifting plans, transport, structural inputs and cost estimation without anyone revisiting where the number came from.
Check the density of every material in the custom library against a verified source when the library is created, and again whenever a material is added. It is a short exercise and it protects a long chain of downstream decisions.
03 Material Library Governance
Building the library
- Restrict it to what you actually specify. A library containing everything is a library in which engineers select approximately the right thing. One containing the twenty materials the business buys is one in which they select the right thing.
- Name materials as procurement knows them. The material name reaches the bill of materials and the title block, so it must be a specification a supplier can quote against — a grade designation and standard reference, not a generic description.
- Carry the properties the bill of materials needs. Material definitions can hold custom properties, which then populate automatically wherever the material is applied. This is the mechanism that makes material-derived columns consistent without engineers typing them.
- Set section hatching per material. Correct hatching is a drawing convention that costs nothing once set in the material definition and communicates material on every section view thereafter.
- Record provenance. Note where each property value came from. A successor asked to justify a density figure to an auditor needs the source, not the number.
Applying materials
A part with no material assigned reports no mass and no material in the bill of materials. Assigning a default material in the part template ensures every new part starts with something, and makes an unassigned part visible rather than silently blank. Whether the default should be a real material or an obviously placeholder entry is a judgement — a placeholder that reads as unassigned is safer, because a plausible default gets left in place.
An assembly containing parts with no material reports an understated mass, and does so without any warning. Where a mass figure will be used for lifting or transport, verifying that every component carries a material is a necessary check rather than a refinement.
Where a vault is in place, this is a good candidate for a release condition — a workflow transition that cannot complete while a required property is absent.
04 Drafting Standards
The drafting standard governs how dimensions, tolerances, symbols, arrows and annotations are presented. It is a document setting, so it lives in templates — but it can also be held as an external file, which is what makes it governable.
Base standards and derived standards
Several recognised standards are supplied. Selecting one sets a large collection of presentation rules at once. In practice, most organisations then modify some of those rules — arrow style, text height, tolerance display, view label format — to match their own drawing office practice.
Those modifications can be saved to an external standard file and applied to other documents and templates. This matters for governance: without it, the modified standard exists only inside whichever templates happened to receive it, and reproducing it in a new template means repeating the modifications by hand and hoping they match.
Choose the recognised standard the business works to, as stated in your drawing office procedure.
Adjust dimension, annotation, view, table and tolerance settings to match established practice.
Export the resulting standard so it exists as a controlled artefact independent of any one document.
Store it in the shared standards location with the templates, read-only for users.
Load it into each template so all three document types present consistently.
When the standard changes, revise the file once and reapply to templates rather than editing each.
A modified standard is a documented departure from a published standard. Where drawings are issued under a contractual or regulatory obligation to work to a named standard, the deviations should be recorded and justified — not held only as settings inside a file.
Keep a short written record alongside the standard file listing each deviation and its reason. It takes very little effort and is exactly what is asked for when a customer or auditor queries a drawing convention.
05 Units & Precision
Setting the system
Units are a document setting carried by the template. The decision covers not only length but mass, volume, angle and their displayed precision — and each is independently configurable, which is where inconsistency creeps in. A template with correct length units and default mass units produces a bill of materials whose mass column is not in the system the rest of the business uses.
- Set every unit, not just length. Length, mass, volume, angle, and the precision of each.
- Match precision to manufacturing reality. Displaying more decimal places than the process can hold implies a tolerance that does not exist and invites unnecessary supplier queries.
- Apply the same settings across all templates. A part template and a drawing template with different unit settings will disagree, and the disagreement surfaces in dimensions.
- Decide the dual-dimension position explicitly. Where drawings are issued to territories using another system, whether to show dual dimensions is a drawing office policy, not an individual choice.
A model imported from a supplier or another system arrives with its own unit definition. If that differs from your working system, dimensions and mass will be wrong by a factor — and the error is not always obvious, because the geometry looks plausible.
Establish a check on import: verify a known dimension and confirm the mass is credible for the material and size before the model is used. This is a routine, cheap check that catches an error class which is otherwise discovered at manufacture.
06 Line Conventions, Layers & Fonts
The presentation layer. Individually minor, collectively the difference between documentation that reads as a coherent standard and documentation that reads as several people's preferences.
Line styles and thickness
Which line type and weight is used for visible edges, hidden detail, centrelines, section lines and construction geometry.
Control: set in the drafting standard, carried by templates, verified against printed output rather than on screen.
Layers
Named layers with assigned colour, style and thickness, used to organise drawing content and control what prints.
Control: define the layer set in drawing templates so every drawing starts with the same structure.
Fonts and text height
Annotation and dimension fonts, and the height of each class of text.
Control: set in the drafting standard. Use fonts available on every workstation, or drawings render differently on different machines.
Line weight, font rendering and colour behave differently on screen, on paper and in an exported file. A drawing that reads clearly on a high-resolution display can lose hidden-detail distinction when printed, or shift text position when exported.
Validate the convention set against the outputs you actually issue — printed at the sizes you use, and exported to the formats you send to suppliers — not against the screen. This is a one-off exercise that prevents a recurring class of supplier query.
07 Deployment
Everything in this layer reaches workstations by the same two mechanisms already established for templates and libraries, and it should be deployed at the same time and by the same process.
| Artefact | Reaches the workstation via | Locked? |
|---|---|---|
| Custom material library | File location setting in the deployment image | Lock |
| External drafting standard | Applied into templates; file held in the shared standards location | Lock the location |
| Units and precision | Carried by templates | Via template control |
| Line styles and layers | Carried by drawing templates and the drafting standard | Via template control |
| Default part material | Carried by the part template | Via template control |
The pattern is consistent: file locations are system options and get locked through the settings file; everything carried by a document is controlled by controlling the template. This is why template governance and this layer cannot sensibly be managed separately — a change to the drafting standard is a change to every template, and both need to move together.
08 Standards Layer Checklist
- Custom material library exists. Restricted to materials the business actually specifies, in a shared controlled location.
- Densities verified. Every material's density checked against a verified source, with provenance recorded.
- Material names are specifications. Named as procurement and suppliers would recognise, not generically.
- Material properties feed the bill of materials. Custom properties on materials populate the columns that need them.
- Section hatching set per material. Correct hatch assigned in the material definition.
- Default material in the part template. Preferably an obviously unassigned placeholder rather than a plausible real material.
- Drafting standard saved externally. Held as a controlled file, not only inside templates.
- Deviations recorded. A written record of each departure from the base standard and its reason.
- Units complete and consistent. Length, mass, volume, angle and precision set identically across every template.
- Import check established. A routine verification of dimension and mass on imported geometry.
- Line conventions verified in output. Validated against printed and exported output at the sizes and formats actually issued.
- Fonts universally available. Only fonts present on every workstation are used.
- File locations locked. Material library and standards locations deployed and locked through the settings file.
- In backup scope and registered. All artefacts captured by backup and recorded in the standards register with owners.
09 Frequently Asked Questions
Can we rely on the supplied material properties?
For preliminary work and relative comparison, generally yes. For anything with engineering consequence — a structural check, a lifting calculation, a mass declared to a customer — the values should be verified against the supplier's data sheet or the relevant published standard.
The supplied values are indicative and represent nominal or typical figures for a broad material class. Actual grade, condition and form can differ meaningfully. The practical approach is to build the custom library from verified sources for materials that carry consequence, and record where each figure came from so it can be defended later.
We work to a national standard that is not among the supplied options. What do we do?
Select the closest supplied base standard, apply the deviations that bring it into line with your national standard, and save the result as an external standard file. That file then becomes your controlled drafting standard and is applied to every template.
The important discipline is recording the deviations in writing alongside the file. A drawing issued as compliant with a named standard should have the basis of that compliance documented, and settings inside a file are not documentation.
Engineers keep changing units on individual documents. How do we stop it?
You largely cannot prevent it, because units are a document property that any user can change. What you can do is make the correct starting point automatic and the deviation visible.
Set units correctly in every template and ensure the assigned default templates are always used rather than the engineer being prompted to choose. Then treat unit deviation as a drawing checking item. Where a vault is in place, a release condition that verifies the unit setting is a stronger control than any system option, because it catches the document at the point it would otherwise be issued.
How do we handle drawings for customers who require a different standard?
Maintain a second external standard file and a corresponding drawing template for that customer or territory. This is one of the legitimate reasons for an additional template — the difference is a genuine document setting, not content.
Keep the number of such variants small and each one justified by an actual requirement. The cost of a second standard is that every future change to drawing office practice must be applied to both, so each additional variant increases maintenance permanently. Where a customer requirement can be satisfied by a note or a title block entry rather than a different standard, prefer that.
Series context. This page is part of the KEVOS® SOLIDWORKS environment administration series. It presents general administration practice and is written to be release-independent wherever possible. Where specific versions, limits or supported platforms are cited, they reflect the SOLIDWORKS 2026 release family and should be verified against current vendor documentation before being relied upon for procurement, platform or upgrade decisions.
SOLIDWORKS is a registered trademark of Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation. Product names are used here for identification and reference only. KEVOS® is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a reseller for Dassault Systèmes.