I’ve been pushing solidworks surfacing very hard over the last few years and I have to say there have been many enhancements made that I’ve been looking for. I am really impressed with 2011. Anyone on 2011 yet?
Can anyone comment on the rumor that SW may go to the Catia kernel in a near future release?
I bet we could create a wish list for enhancements on the forum and attract the attention of the developers. I don’t have contacts there anymore. Comments?
2012?
I’m sure 2012 is baked already. Probably for 2013 …
Were you were asking us who was on 2012- which was just released? 2011 was a decent release, but 2012 has not had significant surfacing functionality. They added the ability to freeze portions of the history tree- which should help all top down modelers. They added costing functionality to Sheet Metal which should be marginally useful- would have been useful for general parts costing for all Solidworks files.
Apart from that this looks like it is a minor update- crashy at that. Rendering should be faster because Modo 501 render engine was significantly improved- so the PV360 engine should hopefully be noticeably faster. Definitely wait till the first service pack.
SolidWorks 2012 is a disappointing release. They’re clearly halting development, core cad development on it, for their new “V6” version. Supposed to come out in a few years. 2012 did not have a single surfacing enhancement, perhaps one if you count feature freeze, which to be honest - you could count as a feature for surfacing work. And a rather decent one at it, too.
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. YET! There must 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 RHO values. A conic is not just locked to the square root of 2 minus 1. I could elaborate if anyone is interested?
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 volatile upon updates and looses constraints easily and I’m 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 a designer drags the sketch geometry, the values of say a bicycle frame … rake length of tubes etc and only yellow and grey dimensions modify.
http://proetools.com/courses/solidworks/solidworksweek-long-surfacing-intensive part of my tubular frame structures class
Pretty sure there’s a way to do that in SW. I believe you’d have to constrain those particular dimensions (head tube angle for instance) to a constrained construction line or plane. Of course it wouldn’t give you the cool color options, but you could do the same thing.
Hi design engine.
I recently upgraded to SW2012 and haven’t found any improvements to my workflow.
Perhaps the SW forums… http://forum.solidworks.com/ would be a good place for your technical questions. I was thrown in the deep end when I started my current job and asked to do some crazy surface modelling and got some great advice on there.
I’m not sure, but maybe the intersection curve sketch feature might be what you’re after. Maybe not.
Yes, you just dimension things in sketches to constrain it how you want. I think you can assign colors to specific sketches, but I don’t think you can coordinate them relative to dimension flexibility, unless you want to really manually organize your dimensions.
As someone who learned parametric modeling in Solidworks, I don’t really mind not having color-coordinated constrained dimensions, since I can usually remember what I did.
Hmm- the issue is not color co-ordination but locking down critical dimensions. In Solidworks you can interactively drag dimensions and this sometimes happens inadvertently. ProE’s method would prevent this by allowing the designer to say “this dimension cannot change” It would be a related feature to fixing a line in Solidworks, but in this case you fix a dimension. Am I catching that right design-engine?
Howdy Marc! Whats the good news? How have you been? Where you working?
