I've always assumed we had to 'manually' create an equal curvature condition on the ends of a spline (when made tangent to another spline or line) until I ran into this message...
Thanks! Mike Wilson
A glimmer of (false?) hope, perhaps? I've been waiting and whining for SW to improve curvature control of splines. I see nothing in the help or API help for SW2004.
to add this relation (spline constraint) that
"Mike J. Wilson" wrote in news:525a3b21082f021f817020de1d8d8a79 @news.1usenet.com:
How did you create this spline?
Zander
Here is a simplified way...
*) Start new 2D sketch *) Draw two horizontal lines, one on the upper right of your screen, the other on the lower left. *) CTRL-select each and hit "Fit Spline". Use Constrained. *) Right-click the newly created spline and select "Split Entities" and try splitting the spline.That's when the message pops up.
Mike Wilson
Cool! I had never played with fit splines before. It looks like it will be very useful, providing a workaround for the lack of curvature control. Strange that the help doesn't point out that the spline matches the curvature of the underlying geometry, whether it's a line, an arc or another spline.
Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems
Because they cannot guarantee it. All "fit spline" does is to draw a new spline from "enough" points located on the underlying geometry such that the distance between the spline and the line/arcs/spline is withing the given tolerance. Do a "simplify spline" with a 0 tolerance to see the spline control points. Remember that splines are polynomial functions, so they cannot have a constant curvature like a circle (ok, it's easier with a line...) But you are correct, SolidWorks/D-Cubed could "easily" add start/end tangency to splines.
FYI, we will "soon" release an addin that does "fit-spline" automatically to all the chains in a sketch, for example to an "exploded" text or to an imported dxf...
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