Reduce it to its most basic shape-the lowest common denominator. You must really think about the overall shape you wish your model to achieve. Whether surface or solid, your SOLIDWORKS models will begin with a sketch. Revolving gives you greater versatility to shape your model, but its basic shape will always be cylindrical. Extruding gives you control of your model from one end to the other.įigure 2. Use both methods to achieve great models, fast, and with greater flexibility.įigure 1. Surface modeling produces super-high-quality models, but can take time. Solid modeling is really, really good at getting a lot done, quickly. The best way to use SOLIDWORKS is to use surfaces and solids to achieve truly marvelous models. Often your models will appear somewhat boxy and dull. They are really great at capturing manufacturing data (like mass, weight, etc.) but they can also be fairly restrictive in what you can create. Solids have many benefits, but there are inherent limitations there, too. But a surface model defines only surfaces, so it is hollow. You can create any shape you can imagine (given enough time and practice). This is somewhat tedious because you generally must build one face of the model at a time, trimming and manipulating as you go. (You can’t really measure it accurately.) You can build your design with surfaces. Easy to do and valuable for initial concept work, but not very versatile or informative. You can do everything on a napkin sketch. There are many ways to arrive at your ideal design destination. But SOLIDWORKS helps you with that by giving you tools that are easy to use and very powerful. You usually need to make countless small changes-no matter how great the concept. It’s very rare that you design something and get it right the first time. Why would you want to do that? Repeatability and changeability. In this way, you can capture design intent.
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It is parametric, which means you assign dimensions to your geometry that tell it how to behave. In the example below, only the yellow body (second from the right), was not selected.SOLIDWORKS, as you might gather from its name, is primarily a solid modeler. If you clear Auto-select, you must select the bodies to cut in the graphics area. Auto-select is faster than All bodies because it processes only the bodies on the initial list and does not rebuild the entire model. Automatically selects all relevant intersecting bodies. Auto-select (Available with Selected bodies).The solid bodies you select are highlighted in the graphics area, and listed under Feature Scope next to. If you do not add the new bodies to the list of selected bodies, they remain intact. If you add new bodies to the model that are intersected by the cutting surface, right-click, select Edit Feature, and select those bodies to add them to the list of selected bodies. The surface cuts only the bodies you select using the pointer. If you add new bodies to the model that precede the cut feature in the FeatureManager design tree and that are intersected by the cutting surface, these new bodies are also rebuilt to include the cut. The surface cuts all bodies every time the feature rebuilds. With multibody parts, under Feature Scope, select one of the following:.The arrow points in the direction of the solid to discard.