Every year I try to discuss issues that came up in my design work the previous year that are not covered by any other available materials (either mine or from others). The main issues I ran into this year with customers and coworkers influenced me to break from the previous flow of the ‘Curvy Stuff’ presentations (which have, over the years, trended towards higher levels of the design process) and go back to flesh-out, test and update the loft information provided in Curvy Stuff 101 (which is somewhat out of date because of improvements in the software over the last four years). I also wanted to address some tips and tricks on setting up, breaking down, and adjusting lofts that I was not previously able to squeeze into previous presentations. This presentation also covers some exploration in the different way that boundary surface deals with start and end tangency vs. loft.
With Curvy Stuff 6, I feel that I have finished my discussion on the topic of modeling organic forms in SolidWorks and am inclined to retire the ‘CurvyStuff’ series until there is something new to discuss. However, keep an eye out on this website – there might be little scraps that I could not fit in that I will post as they come up. And as ‘boundary’ becomes more of my work flow, I might add material discussing this brand new feature.
I know how hard it can be to grasp or reproduce the points if you weren’t actually in the room when the presentation was given. In addition to the presentation powerpoint and the sample files (which have comments on the relevant features, suppressed features, or configurations to make the point), I stole a technique from Mark Matthews and used a second powerpoint to storyboard every adjustment I made to the sample files in the live presentation. Be sure to read the notes in the powerpoints – both the ‘storyboard’ and the main powerpoint have over 5,000 horribly-spelled-and- un-gramatically-worded-descriptions 🙂 on what is happening on their respective slides.
SWW2007-CurvyStuffVI.zip (36MB)
Contents: Powerpoint presentation and working SolidWorks files
