SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible

Matt Lombard

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470258231
• eBook ISBN: 9781118078976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

If you want to gain proficiency and expertise with SolidWorks surface modeling, this is the resource for you. You'll learn how to apply concepts, utilize tools, and combine techniques and strategies in hands-on tutorials. This Bible covers the range from sketching splines and shelling to modeling blends and decorative features. Complete with professional tips and real-world examples, this inclusive guide enables you to coax more out of SolidWorks surfacing tools.

Part I

Laying the Groundwork

In This Part

Chapter 1 Understanding Basic Concepts

Chapter 2 Surfacing Primer

Chapter 1: Understanding Basic Concepts

In This Chapter

Assumed basic skills

Concepts, tools, techniques, and strategies

Understanding the difference between design and modeling

Everyone has a different idea of what the words “basic” and “advanced” mean. In general terms, some users might consider everything in this book advanced, and others might consider it basic. Still, in order to progress, the concepts have to start from somewhere, and so the initial concepts will form the basis for the more advanced material to come later.

SolidWorks probably has more surface and complex shape functionality than you realize, especially if you are coming to this book from a machine design background. Some of the tools are matured, having been available for quite some time, and some are newly added to the software, with some occasional kinks still left to work out.

Regardless of how you have arrived here, surfacing and complex shapes are areas of the SolidWorks software that have been flourishing in recent years, and improve with each new release of the software. Still, it is an area that doesn’t get as much traffic as, say, the extrudes, revolves and fillets, and so bugs, or quirky functionality, can still be found from time to time.

Figure 1.1 shows an example of some of the modeling that you will find in the pages of this book. This is a SolidWorks model of the SolidWorks Roadster, a Shelby Cobra kit car built by SolidWorks employees, and displayed at SolidWorks World 2007. This rendering was done by Matt Sass for the PhotoWorks contest on Rob Rodriguez’s site, www.robrodriguez.com.

Figure 1.1

Model of the SolidWorks Roadster

Rendering by Matt Sass

Assumed Basic Skills

The SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible is intended for a diverse cross-section of readers. The first type of reader is the SolidWorks user who is otherwise knowledgeable about the software, but wants to learn about surfacing and complex shape-creation techniques. This reader may have come from another type of design, and is more mechanical than artistic in method. The second is the user of another surfacing program who has learned SolidWorks basics and wants to transfer surfacing skills from the other program to SolidWorks. This reader is more likely an industrial designer or otherwise artistically inclined. This book assumes you already have a good grasp on the basics, such as sketching and sketch relations, the basics of parametric relations between features, and commonly used terminology in SolidWorks. The SolidWorks Bible can help bring you to this level, and is a great companion to this book for reference on the more basic concepts.

You will find a small amount of overlap between the current edition of the SolidWorks Bible and the SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible. The overlapping topics are splines and multi-body modeling. Both of these skills are essential to working with surfaces and complex shapes, which is why you find them again here, although discussed from a slightly different perspective.

This book was written using early versions of SolidWorks 2008, but most of the concepts discussed can be effectively applied to versions earlier and later. I have tried to make minimal references to version-specific aspects of the interface, but have pointed out where necessary the functional differences if any between features in prior versions.

Assemblies are only discussed in this book in a couple of areas, such as master modeling techniques and multi-body techniques. You will find no reference to any of the specialty techniques such as sheet metal or weldments.

Beyond that, a firm grasp of high school geometry concepts and terminology is necessary. Analytical geometry and simple calculus concepts come into play in the form of tangency, rate of change, and derivatives discussions. Because this book is primarily for actual users of the SolidWorks software, and actual users may or may not have an engineering math background, I will not involve any math or equations directly except for c = 1/r (curvature equals the inverse of radius).

You will find plastic-molded part terminology sprinkled throughout this book, with common references to parting lines, draft, and direction of pull. I have assumed that the reader has a passing familiarity with some form of plastic molding process such as thermoforming, injection molding, rotational molding, or blow molding. A background in metal injection molding, casting, or even forging may also be helpful, as many of the same concepts employed by these manufacturing techniques are also applicable to plastics processes.

Although you will not find drawings discussed in this book, basic mechanical drawing skills are required to get the most out of this book. You must understand basic terminology, such as section, projected view, and orthogonal views.

I intend this book to be primarily for the use of professional CAD operators, whether artist or technical, as opposed to casual or hobbyist users. If you are looking to make characters or equipment for games, SolidWorks may not be your best option. One of the polygonal modelers would be a better bet. Any type of casual user will probably find that complex shapes are easier to create in other software because, as CAD software, SolidWorks tends to require more precision than a tool like Maya or modo, or any of the freeware mesh modelers available.

Concepts, Tools, Techniques, and Strategies

The SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible is organized into four parts that discuss the concepts and tools (two sections are dedicated to the tools), and finally combine techniques and strategies into a series of longer hands-on model walk-throughs. I believe that this approach answers the how and why questions in addition to explaining and demonstrating what individual button clicks do. Tutorials on their own do not explain the decision-making process, but they do demonstrate the workflow. Lectures on their own do not demonstrate the tools in action. Concepts, of course, are useless without application to realistic scenarios.

Demonstrating techniques and strategies gives you, the reader, a head start with visualizing the application of the tools to real-world modeling scenarios. Most of the models used as examples have been adapted from real-world work projects, to keep them as realistic as possible. Techniques in particular will cover topics such as capping rounded ends, making blends at complex intersections, making sharp edges fade into smooth faces, how to use images as reference, how to deal with draft at the edges of complex surfaces, and many other commonly encountered situations.

Strategies refer to some of the bigger picture questions, like “Where do I start?” On a complex model, it is often difficult to know where to start. Also, if you need to make an assembly where the parts all contain an overall shape, how does modeling of that sort work? The model walk-through chapters in Part 4 answer these questions for you and are meant to spark your imagination to come up with new applications for the tools and techniques, and your own modeling strategies.

SolidWorks corporate documentation explains where to find the tools and generally what they do in the Help documentation. The official SolidWorks training materials offered by resellers are basically instructor-guided tutorials, which are valuable, but they stop short of arming the student with the ability to make modeling decisions based on thorough knowledge of the options. The training materials are also not generally available without paying for the reseller class.

You may also find tutorials on the Web that are either simplistic step-by-step instructions or heady and difficult to comprehend. Again, this book fills the gap between them and tries to do it in a more conversational language that conveys the necessary concepts without talking over your head or down to you.

In the course of talking about concepts, tools, techniques, and strategies, most of the individual topics are covered twice, or even three times from different angles. For example, the Fill surface is a tool that I discuss in Chapter 2 to illustrate the concept of trimmed surfaces, again in detail in Chapter 6, and again in multiple chapters of Part 3 as a practical application in tutorials.

As important as knowing positively what types of features work in which types of situations, it is also important to know the kinds of things that do not work the way you might expect. The purpose of talking about limited functionality is not to be derisive to the software or the parent company, but rather to offer the reader of this book as complete a picture as possible of the capabilities of the software. Often when using software, I have felt that if limitations were spelled out completely in the documentation, I could save a lot of time by avoiding figuring out the limitations for myself. In this book, I have made every attempt to be fair to the software, and if it works, I want to tell the story of how well it works and how to use it to its best advantage. On the other hand, if it doesn’t work as you might expect, I feel the obligation to do my readers the service of letting them know where the reliable limits of the software lie.

The point is that whether you use this book as a text to read straight through, or as a reference to look up topics as needed, I hope you find the information well presented and laid out logically. It is not possible to arrange all of the topics in sequential order.

Understanding the Difference Between Design and Modeling

The SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible, as the name suggests, focuses on modeling parts in SolidWorks with the purpose of manufacturing those parts. This is not a book about design. The act of modeling assumes that the design (or a starting place for the design) already exists. The design may exist in one of many forms. It could be sketched on paper, scanned into a digital image format, or modeled in clay or foam. It could be taken from a digital camera, the back of an envelope or napkin, or a whiteboard. It could already be drawn or modeled in a different 2D or 3D software, it could exist as a 3D point cloud from a 3D scanner, or it may simply exist only in your head. Wherever the design comes from, it probably exists somewhere else before it shows up in SolidWorks.

Dividing the tasks into des...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Laying the Groundwork
• Chapter 1: Understanding Basic Concepts
• Chapter 2: Surfacing Primer
• Part II: Understanding the Tools
• Chapter 3: Sketching with Splines
• Chapter 4: Sketching in 3D
• Chapter 5: Creating Curves
• Chapter 6: Using the Primary Shape Creation Features
• Chapter 7: Using Advanced Fillets
• Chapter 8: Shelling
• Part III: Using Secondary, Management, and Evaluation Tools
• Chapter 9: Using Secondary Shape Creation Features
• Chapter 10: Working with Hybrid Features
• Chapter 11: Managing Surfaces
• Chapter 12: Using Direct Editing Tools
• Chapter 13: Managing Bodies
• Chapter 14: Evaluating Geometry
• Part IV: Using Specialized Techniques
• Chapter 15: Modeling a Ladle
• Chapter 16: Modeling a Trowel
• Chapter 17: Modeling Blends
• Chapter 18: Modeling a Plastic Bottle
• Chapter 19: Modeling Decorative Features
• Chapter 20: Modeling Overmolded Geometry
• Chapter 21: Working from Digitized Data
• Chapter 22: Using Master Model Techniques
• Chapter 23: Post-Processing Data