CAD Forum

HerrTick

What is a 2D drawing? It is a guided tour of a 3D object. It is the conversation you would have with someone who asked you to explain the details of your 3D design.

HerrTick

Truth! Buying can be as much (or more) work than making. This is where ERP people need to get cooperative and creative.

It does sound like this needs to be an assembly.

HerrTick

When even your model is ready for a vacation...

HerrTick

Maybe BlankWorks or Logopress?

HerrTick

Longshot...

Map as points in cartesian plane, then convert point to cylindrical CSYS.

HerrTick

My favorite voodoo is the STEP 203 flip-flop. Sometimes, due to export settings, STEP export converts cylinders, cones, and planes into B-surfaces. Re-exporting as STEP 203 and re-importing often re-converts these surfaces to their original topology. Why? I don't know. This has worked in SW, Creo, a...

HerrTick

Not going to play penny games with SW. If they want me, they know where to find me, and how much I charge.

HerrTick

There's a limit to how efficient you can make this model. The sheer quantity of faces and resulting intersections is going to be a burden no matter what.

Good place to use the Freeze Bar.

HerrTick

It took me a bit to figure out why the OP has a problem, as I am so habituated to doing this in a SW-friendly way (which I actually started doing in Pro/E). IN my "CAD orthodoxy", layout sketches are for layout. They are never used for directly making solid or surface features. They are on...

HerrTick

I've seen more than a few CAD switches driven by managers that liked their last job's CAD. That, and scleraotic, overly-vocal, underly-talented users that prefer one devil to the next.

For 96.83% of firms, you could throw SW, SE, Inventor, and Creo in a hat, pick one, and be just fine.

HerrTick

Are you actually designing a camera? Or are you implementing an existing camera?

Can't help with the former.

For the latter, we typically include geometry for the field-of-vision ("FOV"), usually in the form of a tapered rectangle emanating from the camera focus.

HerrTick

Parasolids behave differently than STEP. Parasolid allows for surface edges to be defined by adjacent faces. STEP files have rigid, curve-based definitions of face edges. Generally, parasolid is better in SW, as SW is driven by the Parasolid kernel. Sometimes STEP files can be improved by exporting ...

HerrTick

About the best you can do is dump a few gallons of formaldehyde on the festering mess and move forward. Preserve the carcass for posterity, and take what you need as you need it.

HerrTick

I recommend absolute minimal detail. Something like a model of a sheet of paper and text referring to the specific document. You absolutely don't want anything to indicate the document layout and text is in any way controlled in SolidWorks.

HerrTick

The biggest problem I see with organic surface definition is over-definition of splines, especially using too many defining points. Use more C1 and C2 controls, and fewer defining points. Also, not every fixed point needs to be a defining point. There's a load of flexibility in a spline. Often, addi...

HerrTick

Dimensioning to hidden silhouettes is poor form. I don't do it and would not accept if it was being done for me.

If the section resolves as splines when it shouldn't, there is a model problem that needs fixing.

HerrTick

A section view would be much more appropriate.

HerrTick

But I don't want to lose the visibility of the edge lines where flat faces join to curves, etc....

WHY?

HerrTick

I never worked on CATIA, but did work CATIA-adjacent when I had a job making automotive interior parts 2001 to 2005 . CATIA is truly in a phylum of its own. There were some CATIA-to-SolidWorks translators available. None of them worked well enough to be worth the effort. The best solution was to hav...

HerrTick

CATIA is a completely different animal. No shared DNA.

HerrTick

Material data is valuable. Much of that information is closely guarded and proprietary. While there is a fair amount of data available for common materials, it's hard to come by in-depth data on much more. This is especially true for non-linear properties. Last time I had to do a creep study, we had...

HerrTick

I have a friend who was a material scientist at Keebler. He could literally tell you everything there was to know about how the cookie crumbles.

HerrTick

"Domain expansion" B-surfaces have a finite domain. If you need to add beyond that domain (e.g. offsetting adjacent faces), the attempt will fail. Domain expansion is replacing a B-surface on a solid with a face with a larger domain. Example: Use untrim to create a new surface, and maybe ...

HerrTick

Not a popular position, but... Design structure should be separate from manufacturing structure. The manufacturing assembly should be an entirely separate assembly from the design layout. Consider also tangential assemblies like service kits. These are usually a collection of parts without design c...

HerrTick

The problem arises with CAD jockeys who are lazy or give up too easily.

If the feature can be adjusted, that is how the job should be done. If not, best to lobotomize the model rather than keep a feature tree that causes the model to self-destruct.

HerrTick

SW still keeps track of where the sketches were created before they were used in features. The rollback is probably rolling back to the original sketch position in the tree.

Try moving the rollback bar to between the feature and the subordinate sketch and see where it sits.

HerrTick

...but that's not the case, (15000mm is represented as 15000mm and not 15M).

Waiting for the day I see "15kmm"...

HerrTick

Nearly all my markup is done with screen shots on Snagit. Then I can paste images directly in the chat apps that dominate my workplace communication.

Most of my cohorts and clients are not interested in installing additional software to view 3D markups.

HerrTick

I think we can all agree... regardless of which system... always always ALWAYS have the "projection cone" symbol on your title block.

HerrTick

Just hide the old revisions. No compelling reason to keep more than the last three.

In any respectable firm, the real meat of the revisions is in the ECO documentation, anyway.

HerrTick

The macro programmer probably decided to have each point imported into its own sketch to avoid having points accidentally merge. Too bad for him. There's an option setting that prevents this. Also, points could be fixed as they were created.

HerrTick

My dad was educated in Germany and learned 1st angle there. He was glad to leave it behind, as 3rd angle was more intuitive.

HerrTick

One of the bass-ackward things about 1st-angle is that they do sections in 3rd-angle.

HerrTick

These are imported surfaces, so continuity is not explicitly defined. Appears to be nearly C2.

HerrTick

If the entire part consists of cylinders and planes with no compound bends, it ought to flatten with sheet metal. You don't need to model with sheet metal features. (I wouldn't in this case). Maintain constant thickness and you can convert to sheet metal and flatten. Make sure the spring leaves don'...

HerrTick

I've seen this in both SW and NX. On models where there are B-surfaces that meet at a tangency, the tangent edge sometimes drifts when the surfaces are extended (e.g. by offsetting adjacent face). Most likely this is an artifact of parasolid's tolerant modeling algorithm. If the faces met at a sharp...

HerrTick

Start by making a copy of the proposed path and add each segment incrementally. See if there's a particular corner that causes trouble. The underconstrained sketch should not be an issue. It might help to add a buffer sketch consisting of a sketch on the same plane and extracting the section sketch ...

HerrTick

As was said, view orientation is key. Start with an angle that best shows assembly and fastener direction. I prefer trimetric over iso. I like having the two "horizontal" vectors at different angles from view horizontal. Seems to help visuals. Sometimes I use a custom view, but the assembl...

HerrTick

probably meaning to take a rip at people who worship SolidWorks

SW has (had?) a very loyal and dedicated community. But we collectively were hardly devout.

Old school PTC users, on the other hand...

HerrTick

Every job or career or business requires a certain amount of grind. It's just a question of whether the grind is worth it.

HerrTick

{repeating with mocking sneer} Recommended themes are Elegance, Breeze, Prolight If users need to change settings to accommodate the layout. The site is BROKEN . BROKEN . [indent][indent][indent] BROKEN [/indent][/indent][/indent]. [indent] BROKEN [/indent]. also your indent is broken

HerrTick

HerrTick

Banner is all askew and covers vital control points.

HerrTick

Machinists, toolmakers, and pattern makers did a lot to cover the sins of drafters and designers. My first 3D gig was at a company that had piles of blueprints (yes, the actual blue). There was a lot of 2D-to-3D work. More than a few parts had fudged dimensions that were impossible model. I asked ar...

HerrTick

So why do we allow our tools to always drive us to a 2D element to make 3D objects? Great question. I think there are lots of elements to the answer. The first would be manufacturing processes, especially machining. Most press- and mill- and lathe-type work is more 2½D than 3D. It's difficult to t...

HerrTick

I realized I gave up a long time ago on this issue. I reverted to a now longstanding habit of just showing thickness as a reference dimension.

HerrTick

A roundabout way to get the precision the way you want might be to assign the Thickness value to a variable. (Old Pro/E trick.)

HerrTick

Displayed decimal places may be tied to your measuring tool precision or properties precision.

HerrTick

Just a concept. CadForum would be welcome to punch it up. Texture, colors, flying shards...

HerrTick

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-nav ... sky%20dong.

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