Solidworks Surfacing....

[design-engine]

Just curious how many people on the forum are using Solidworks for surfacing? I've been using Soldworks for over 10 years and am really pushing the surfacing tools over the past three.

Maybe you guys can post some images of work you have done here!

Edited by: design-engine

 

[wtb999]

Hi Bart,

What is your opinion on surfacing in SW vs ProE? From what
I have heard, ProE wins out in Surfacing.

 

[michael3130]

I've used it quite a bit for surfacing, I will try and post images over the next couple of days.

 

[design-engine]

I think the surfacing in solidworks has come a long ways. I started taking the surfacing tools in SolidWorks seriously in 2007 for one major reason, the boundary surface. In the 2008 or 2009 release we got options for building selections sets for the boundary surface. Before that you had to break up the sketch that was later projected onto a surface because the boundary surface would not let you be specific what parts of the surface edge to grab. That is all resolved now.

About the Boundary Surface. I like how it will let me choose 2 curves in one direction and one in the other much like the rail tool. I wish Pro/E could do that.

The 2011 version has some things missing that I would prefer but it's does 90 percent of everything one would require. Workflow oriented I prefer Pro/E still but that is to be expected since I have so much experience in Pro/E surfacing.I have made lists before of things that are missing in Solidworks and someone there has been making changes to the software

1 One thing that really bugs me about solidowks is how features are handled in the model tree. I don't like it how lets say feature 6 thru 8 are curves (for example) and at feature 20 I choose to use those curves in a boundary surface, the curves are consumed into the surface at that feature.My analogy is that is a violation to mess with the time and space continuum. Those features should stay at where they were created.

2 Another thing that bugs me is the only place i can look at the striation of the surface geometry is during the feature creation. I need to see the mesh/flow of a surface at all times in order to understand how water might run off the surface (so to speak). U and V lines topographically over a surface. There is not a mesh display option. It would be easy to add.

3 Another thing that bugs me along those same lines is that I don't have a tangency edge display. In Pro/E I have been asking for Knot display or in Alias Speak Isoparms. We finally got that in WF4.0. SolidWorks is still off a couple years I suppose.

4 another thing that bugs me and I have pushed the tools very hard (really needed to have taken my class to understand my workflow here) ... is when modifying underlying curve geometry the geometry looses parent child constraints and does not update like I would expect. I still impress advanced SW users when I give them demos of sw because this proving form technique is not a workflow many have discovered in SW.Catia and UG have the same problem.Note the Bicycle frame image below. I can drag and change all the frame geometry and the frame will update with out fail. We do that in the Pro/E surfacing for 10 years and that's what I mean by designers have not discovered that work flow in SW yet. In my surfacing class you really learn how to take strategic advantage of parent child relationships and learn to trust they don't break apart and hold together.

5 I would like it if I could convert an Extrude to a cut or an extruded surface. I asked for that with PTC in 1994 and never got it till WF 1.0 and SW will probably never go that route because thats how Pro/E does it. I'm just saying that function would be an improvement.

6 When managing rounds in my Pro/E class one methodology we teach.... Is to cut or hog out a problem area and get a round to go on any size I wish and patch the remaining area w/ a surface patch. I solidify the surface and fill the hole. In Solidworks you can use a surface to use as a cut. But to use a surface as a fill function you only have thicken. If you have a complete closed quilt you can solidify the area. There is not a 'patch' option like we have in Pro/E. (DE is teaching a Pro/E surfacing class at the same time as a SW surfacing class and all this workflow stuff is fresh in my head) The work around is simple. You simply use surface offset and chose all the five walls and offset a value of zero and knitt all those surfaces together.

7 In Pro/E we have an option for tangency to inner edges. SW does not give us option to trigger that on or off. There needs to be that capability but I presume they should let us see tangent lines before giving us that option. They would come together.

8 not so important because there are other ways to manage 'Edit References' or Reroute is not available in SW. I found many Pro/E users dont use it which is probably why SW program managers don't have the functionality in SW.

I could keep adding to the list but I think it's better to complement the solidworks folks for a great job. I even like the 3d and 2d sketch spline functions. specifically for the handles you obtain with the internal edit point. Pro/E does not have that capability and I've been asking for that for 8 years.

a model from my tubular frame structures surfacing workshop. [url]http://proetools.com/courses/solidworks/solidworksweek-long- surfacing-intensive[/url]

We have duplicated everything from our Pro/E surfacing class except for the Creo Freeform Sub'D modeling [url]http://proetools.com/courses/pro-surface/prosurface-level-10 surface-freestyle-creo-sub-d-modeling [/url], Surface Edit [url]http://proetools.com/courses/pro-surface/level-8-advanced-su rface-modeling-with-surface-edit [/url] nor Trajpar VSS exercises. Can't do those types of surfaces in Solidworks. YET!


Now that Im on a roll and thinking about other items I wish I had in SolidWorks... to make it better and I will post these comments on the SW forum later so let me ramble here and clean it up over the day....



I like how in SW2011 a designer can drop a curve down and upon dragging the curve create a link to another curve. Pro/E needs an auto alignment function like that.

Enhancement request for Sketcher...

1 Too bad SW still does not let you auto Dimension a sketch. There has to be a reason they don't have intent manager.... Maybe it's simply to offer a differentiation with makes since to me.

2 it's about time for SW to have a conic sketcher geometry that allows for RH values. A conic is not just locked to the square root of 2 minus 1.

3 There is always a work around but.... it's important for solidworks to add the ability to project a 3d curve onto a surface. That functionality is missing. The work around is to use edge on the curve sketch to place the curve back onto a 2d plane then project it or to utilize a curve on surface which leads me to another complaint or issue.

4 The Curve on Surface tool in Solidworks is volital upon updates and looses constraints easily and Im not sure how to explain this w/o a video but there is something going on there at the math level too that may need looking at with the programmers.

5 In Pro/E we have three different color dims in sketcher mode. grey yellow and orange. grey are soft dims and are auto generated. Yellow are hard dimensions or specifically applied or modified. Orange are locked dimes and don't move when dragged. SolidWorks needs the ability to lock dimensions so when i drag the values of say a bicycle frame ... rake etc and only yellow and grey dimensions modify.

Edited by: design-engine

 

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[carrieives]

One of my favorite things about Solidworks is multibody parts. We're doing a bunch of overmolded parts here and having it all in one model is good.


Unfortunatly, a couple of features have a tendancy to blow up, then features downstream flip the sketch plane direction - so it would be great if you could control sketch plane direction.


I would like to send the ability to reroute references. I was trying to fix a troubled model by redoing the first couple of features. I would have loved to be able to replace reference on a couple of surfaces instead of redefining each feature and changing which face was referenced (old feature vs new).


I am still waiting for Solidworks to allow you to have sketch entities constrained to faces - sometimes there just isn't an edge to constrain to but the face is there.


Solidworks can add dimensions to your sketch for you now, but I was not pleased with the behavior and turned it off - it wasn't like the grey dimensions in Pro/E, it was adding the equivelent of yellow dimensions but didn't know what I wanted for a dimension scheme.

 

[design-engine]

carrieives: can you comment more on the autodims functions?

And have you figured out how to lock dims yet? That would go so freeken far with my SW presentations and making this software flexible with respect to parent child relationships....