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Creo 2.0 Freestyle

M

mkzler

New member
After several years of expired maintenance it's time to reactivate or make the jump to Solidworks. As in independent freelancer, staying up to date with one software is tough enough financially. I'd love to be running both ProE and Solidworks, but I just can't afford it. I've talked with a lot of people, done some SW demos, and read a lot of the comparison debates here and in other online forums. For the type of work I do - mostly injection molded consumer products (lots of surfacing) - it sounds like I would be better off sticking with ProE. Obviously there are many different opinions, and there is great work being done on both systems. But when I talk to guys who have a lot of experience with both systems, the general consensus seems to be that ProE is still more powerful than SW when it comes to building complex and easily modifiable surface models. Seems like this has a lot to do with SW dropping references....at least that's what I hear.

While I want to work with the software that gives me maximum functionality, my main priority is to be as marketable as possible as a designer. The general trend in my line of work seems to be moving toward SW, and I certainly see more demand for SW designers. After a few demos, I was beginning to lean towards SW. Workflow seems very easy and I really love the "multiple bodies in a single part" function - what a great way for designing overmolded parts.

Then I started looking into the freestyle feature that's included with Creo 2.0. I've done a little looking around at videos and forum reports on this tool. But I wanted to get more feedback from anyone that might be giving this feature a lot of use. It looks like a game changing tool, but how functional is it? I've really only seen videos of very cool surfaces being created very quickly, but what then? How well does a freestyle feature integrate with with other features like extudes, revolves, traditional boundary surfaces, etc? Can we control size of the freestyle feature in any way? Can we add freestyle features to existing geometry (and reference existing geometry). For example, if I modeled a head shape using boundary blends, could I use freestyle to add details like a nose? Will the freestyle feature update if the parent surfaces are modified? Can we build onto existing freestyle features with parametric extrudes, revolves, etc (referencing freestyle feature)? Problems with offsetting freestyle surfaces? How well does this feature really fit into creating a fully finished "toolable" solid part? What are the limitations?

Yes, I have lots of questions. Thanks for any feedback guys!

Mike
 
Freestyle surfaces integrate to the rest of the features as good as other surfaces made by regular surfacing features.(offset,thicken,replace surface,merge,trim,... all are applicable to freestyle surfaces). freestyle surfaces(quilts) are always made of four sided patches, so it saves you from dealing with hassle of 3 sided degenerate surfaces.about controlling size in freestyle, you can setup bounding planes using regular datum planes, and in freestyle feature using the align function, you can align control cage faces to those planes. (planarize function can be used for that purpose as well).
I think you can download a 30 day trial and try it yourself:
PTC - Creo - 30-Day Creo 2.0 Free Trial Now Available!
 
A thing to consider when dealing with freestyle surfaces is that although it's very easy to build a complex organic shape easily, it is then not as easy to "correct" it. That's probably the reason why freestyle is usually presented as a "concept design" tool, if you increase the number of subdivisions to add creases and details, then you won't be able to easily modify the underlying general shape. That said, is is for sure a great tool to have, and integration with other Creo modeling tools is perfect.

Paolo
 
Another issue with Freestyle surfaces is draft, there's no special tool available to build draft built into a freestyle surface. and the draft line constantly changes when push and pull on control vertices, see this quick model i made, perhaps the first thing i'd do to model this using regular surfacing is extracting some curves from the model, one of which would be the draft line, but now that I've modeled with freestyle i don't have the draft line,and the silhouette curve feature returns an error.quality of the surface is great tho :)
%5BUNSET%5D.png
 
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Solidworm

great job. every time I see your examples I promise myself to give freestyle one more chance:)

btw, can you introduce step by step how did you achieve such results?
 
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Thanks Jacek, see here for a video. its pretty basic. I've used only 3 commands, move,scale,mirror.(select 720p for best quality from bottom right corner of the player)
 
Thanks for all the feedback. Nice looking model Solidworm. The speed and flexibility is an obvious benefit for conceptual iterations. For a fully finished part, would you start modeling over the freestyle feature using conventional feature so you could control details like draft?...Using the freestyle feature more as a visual guide, but not actually referenced by the conventional features?
 
mkzler said:
For a fully finished part, would you start modeling over the freestyle feature using conventional feature so you could control details like draft?
Click to expand...

Yes, the way I work is freestyle to quickly generate a "styling" surface, to see how the model will look and feel. After that, once the overall general shape is defined, I'll re-build it with standard surfacing tools allowing more control and precision. SubDs are excellent if you have to do large, radical modifications during a design study phase
 
Mike,

Many Engineers can be closed to using Freestyle. Even some of our instructors in the past have thought freestyle not to be a viable option for our customers. I tell everyone the same thing. Spend 6+ hrs with me using this tool and you will change your mind. So if you are using it at a high level you still have to contend with your deliverable having that feature in the model.... The engineers that receive your deliverable get upset. With all it takes time. We like our parametric models for a reason. I created a two day class for this tool in creo and have been teaching Sub'd modeling for almost 15 years in Maya It's an amazing workflow.

SW I hear is up in the air for developing a sub'd tool in their package. Trek is pushing them very hard. SW is stuck now converting their UI to a Catia Kernel .... I think they have their hands full.

Here is one I've mentioned on the forum before. I actually want our software to cost more so we as designer's or design engineers can charge more for our consulting. We teach Rhino at Design engine and our class costs twice as much as the software costs.

I could talk for hours offsetting surfaces for nominal wall offsets.
 
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