Is SolidWorks a Drafting System?

A nitpick, ACAD doesn't do oblique, the user does it using ACAD.

Oblique views are, IMHO, just a lazy version of an isometric that distorts geometry. Only useful if you have to do the projection yourself.

Perspective would be a neat addition to drawing views. Apparently, not enough people have submitted enhancement requests for it.

To answer the subject question, SW is not a drafting system. At least not primarily. It is a modeling system, emphasizing solids. It does incorporate drafting tools to document the models on paper. Many (most?) people actually use it as a drafting system, using the models and drafting tools to get drafting done far more effectively than any other "drafting system".

I wonder if the idea of "Drafting", even in the 2D CAD sense, is going away, at least for 3d users.

Perspective views are possible on SW drawings by making a named view in the model while the display has perspective turned on, and then using that named view on the drawing.

Could you simulate an oblique projection by making an Auxiliary view from an Isometric?

matt

I had to really dig to find oblique views. I found them in a book where everyone had crewcuts and horn-rimmed glasses. No brown people, either. America in the 50's, I guess.

Oblique views are not really relevant in modern CAD drafting, where there are so many better ways of representing an object. Adding oblique views to 3D CAD would be like ensuring that all automobiles had harnesses in case you wanted a horse to pull you around.

It was not difficult to find in SW help how to add perspective views to a drawing.

Thanks for pointing this out. I had tried using the current model view, and didn't go the extra necessary step.

D-FENS

"P."

"P.", I an assembly or part model, turn on perspective, orient to your liking and then save a named view. In drawing mode, insert view by selecting the previously saved named view.

Didn't think to look in help. My nitpick there is that it should be selectable in the same way shaded, HLR and HLV are from the view commands.

French would be the old stick and paper book. But Bertoline is up to date AND exhaustive.

I pulled an old Audel's Machinists and Toolmaker's Handy Book off the shelf and it fell open to a page which had an oblique view on it. (Audel's Machinists and Toolmakers Handy Book, 1941/42, Theo Audel & Co., p909). The illustration on page 1100 shows the real power of these views. They are illustrating scribing lines on a surface plate. The lines of most importatance are shown true, but the sense of depth and positioning of the surface gauge are represented by the 3rd dimension. The book frequently used oblique instead of axonometric projection for the fourth view in many drawings.

Oblique is an interesting projection and would have use for certain applications. Napkin sketching is one. Illustrations for end users is another. Oblique has one advantage, it shows the object in 3D, but shows the front view true to size and shape. You draw the front view and then add depth by projecting 45 degrees up and to the right. This means that on 2

1/2 D stuff you can show the whole object in one view and have the important features true to size and dimensioned.

That70sTick wrote:

In two of the last three jobs I have had, drafting was the end product. The job with the fastest timeline went straight to CNC and didn't bother. They were a tooling shop. Of course the customer had drawings.

The other two were OEMs and they had to have paper just to sell their product as well as for a formalized manufacturing system.

I wouldn't say lazy. They do have some very useful applications, especially for illustrative purposes in user instructions.

Well we know how to deal with this one. SW enhancement web site.

The current method of creating a view in the part or assembly is very ProEngineer like (for those who have made section views in Pro/E).

I hope not. I don't want to live in a Matrix dream world. We are constraining our lives (work and play) around what computers are capable of. The human mind is highly underrated these days.

I would agree that oblique view has some use. I've been using it for hand sketches without knowing what it was called. I still don't think it's very relevant to CAD, where it is a simple matter to just add another view. If my personal financial resources were tied to development of a CAD program, that money had better be spent on something more important.

It is hard to find a board draftsman these days. Even the word draftsman has faded from use in favor of draftsperson.:) I know one up in Michigan, 90+ years old and still very good at what he does. Even he was looking at SW.

I think the crux of this issue is not the medium, but the limitations on what can be done because of the medium. I think we agree the final product must communicate something useful about the object(s) being described. Manual drafting has a lot of limitations, especially when it comes to change and making information easily available. But the medium also limits to some extent the creative ways that have, in the past, been developed to communicate data.

I remember the first time I used Pro/E to develop prints for a small stamping. The vendor came back with an outrageous quote. They said we were asking for features that they would find it very hard to put into the part. We asked howso? They responded by describing the intersection of the base trim of the fillet which Pro/E described very accurately. They weren't used to seeing that, even though with a little discussion they came to realize that those features would naturally be in any stamping made that way. Hand drawings left out a lot of details in favor of what was important. CAD tends to require all the details and would have a hard time deciding which were necessary to show and which were not. There are a lot of these short cuts and removal of detail that a computer program would find very hard to do in the drafting stage.

To open a new can of worms there is now a standard for annotating 3D models which I don't think SW can do much about. I know this has been discussed here in the past and some people have found ways to do so, but the methods seemed awkward methods at best. It seems like moving down this path would obviate the need for 2D projections and drawings, but SW doesn't seem to be championing it.

Dale Dunn wrote:

I'm actually excited about that new standard. (I'm drawing a blank on the name just now.) If SW makes it easy to implement that standard, it could be a benefit to everyone, not just those whose only documentation would be the model (in STEP AP238 which could hold the extra data, IIRC). If I can fully define the tolerancing while modeling, that should help by moving the tolerancing process closer to the modeling process. Thats where I want to think about it, not later when its time to make drawings. I'm assuming, of course, that it will be easy to get those annotations onto a drawing. That and the vastly improved automatic dimensioning in 05 could save me a lot of time.

(I'm drawing a blank on the name just now.)

ASME Y14.41

There's also an ISO in the works, but don't think it's released yet.

That's it. Thanks.

I am still using 2004 at work, but for class preparation I use 2005. I want to do something really simple (I think). I want to create a simple part and then in a drawing dimension the isometric view so the students can make a model and 3 view. Is SW going to make this easier? No-how, no-way.

1. Can't import dimensions to an isometric view. Even so, the import dimension property manager doesn't communicate this small limitation. It just doesn't work and doesn't complain.

1. You can however, import dimensions to a front, right or top view and then change the view to isometric. The dimensions are then shown dangling.

2. Can't reposition dimensions properly in the isometric view. The extrusion depth dimensions are especially obnoxious. Also, when using contour sketches the dimensions are stuck to the sketch plane and can't be repositioned.

1. Even though true length is checked, manually created dimensions in the isometric view are showing projected length.

2. Select other is available in the RMB when dimensioning in an isometric view, but it doesn't work. Not only that, but under certain conditions is can lock up/prevent selecting anything in the view. This worked in 2003.

1. GRRR, now I am getting mad. I turn on hidden line and pick a back edge and a front edge. They are parallel in the model but the dimension is in degrees. And it isn't just hidden lines. Parallel line on many lines come out in degrees. This worked in 2003.

2. Diameters are shown as radii in isometric views and can't be changed.

1. So maybe I can export the isometric view into DWGEditor and dimension it there. Nope, the geometry is no longer true length. It is scaled to an odd scale of 1.225. Vertical lines should be translated true length but they are not.

One of the big problems for SW in making isometric drawings is that it tends to want to display imported dimensions in the plane in which they were made, not in the plane appropriate to the projection being viewed. If dimensions are being placed by hand then they can be made to lie in the appropriate isometric projection plane.

Use the dwg export/import translator built into SolidWorks.

Kman

I got so frustrated that I resorted to SE14 to make my iso views. Smooth, quick and SE can dimension a hole correctly in iso (read diameter dimension). It can even drop centermarks on an elliptical representation of a round hole and put correct dimension between a centerpoint and an edge.

Yes, see what you mean. Some of the symbols do not translate cleanly from

2004/SP4.2 to AutoCAD 2000 in my case Ah, who needs ANSI anyways! (grin)

Kman