Inspiration: Each year’s ‘Curvy Stuff’ presentations are inspired by the biggest issue I ran into with SolidWorks the previous year as the DiMonte Group worked with our clients to achieve their design goal.
I kept seeing clients and coworkers stymied by the problem of converting the design in their head (or in the case of reverse engineering, the product or model sitting right in front of them) into the SolidWorks features required to model it. Of course, products don’t care about the features that were used to model them – they are composed of the faces that are a product of those features, and my experience is that concentrating on the faces is much more critical to eventual success.
In this next level of the ‘Curvy Stuff’ series, I wanted to share that understanding the ‘flow’ of the faces that SolidWorks features creates helps one break up a product into the faces required to model it – and after you’ve worked out and understood the faces you need, the question of what features to use and whether to use a surfaces/solids/a-hybrid-approach answers itself.
Abstract: Introduce the ‘7- immutable laws’ of modeling curvy features in SolidWorks. Discuss the UV ‘flow’ behind the scenes of the SolidWorks curvy features and how analyzing the corresponding shapes of the product you want to model will suggest how to dissect the model into manageable, easy to understand pieces.
Benefit: Attendees learn how to overcome modeling roadblocks by challenging their biases, understanding how SolidWorks works at a root level and understanding that they are not modeling ‘features’ but ‘faces’ (it sounds odd, but that is the mindset I have learned leads consistently to eventual success when making curvy models)
SWW2004_CurvyStuff201.zip (14MB)
Contents: Powerpoint presentation and working SolidWorks files
