1. Home
  2. Solidworks CAD Design software
  3. tips backlog - draft analysis

tips backlog - draft analysis

I've been driving SW a lot the last two months, and have recently picked up a couple of simple tips that might help a person or two out there in cyberworld. Instead of sitting on the tips, I thought I'd spit one out every day or so until I run out/get busy again. Please don't haze me if they seem obvious - I've got thousands and thousands of hours on the software, and the tips were new to me (little things I've missed or only just recently figured out), so I figure they might help someone else too.

Tip for today:

Draft analysis on molded parts is so important, its worth a hot key.

When doing draft analysis on a ribbed part with lots of faces, it can be really hard to be sure you caught everything; one tiny little yellow, undrafted face in a sea of green is easy to miss, especially if you have HLR-edges-when-shaded on.

What I've learned to do is to turn the SW background to white, and the positive draft color to white. With HLR-edges-when-shaded off, I know that the part is completely drafted when it disappears against the background! This makes it almost impossible to accidentally miss a tiny, little, undrafted face. Saved my butt a couple of times already.

Cheers! Ed

Reply to
Edward T Eaton
Loading thread data ...

Thanks Ed,

Nice tip - reminds me of how the SWX 'Compare' utility displays when one sets it to show only the differences. The differences show themselves as features flying around on an otherwise empty screen - impossible to miss! Keep the tips coming.

Sincerely, Jerry Forcier

Edward T Eat> I've been driving SW a lot the last two months, and have recently picked up

Reply to
Jerry Forcier

Keep these Tips flowing Ed. Nice one!

Reply to
Ray Reynolds

Thank you! Just what the cad doctor ordered (well what I asked for a while back!), I'm very new to Solidworks and any help is greatly appreciated. :-)

Reply to
pete

But wait, there's more!!

If you use the "Face classification" switch, the number of faces for each classification is shown in a little box, and you don't have to play trix with the colors because you can hit the lightbulb and turn off the faces for any classification.

Way ccol.

Plus, for guys with faulty memories like me, with the face classification turned on, when you hit the green check to exit, it gives you the option to save the face colors. Now that's cool. The only problem is that it would take you a week of RMBing to set all the face colors back to the model color, so I hook up a macro someone else wrote to a hotkey and it just happens!

Draft analysis is definitely one of my favorite functions in SW.

matt

Reply to
matt

I was just showing this to one of the guys in the office, and we hit the X to exit the dialog, and the face colors got changed anyway. An ugly bug if you don't have a macro handy to remove those colors. I have not been able to reproduce - anyone else run into this problem?

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

Ed,

Have you ever looked at FaceWorks? FaceWorks has its own draft analysis which not only stores the positive, negative, and zero draft surfaces in a seperate folder, it also will find undercuts and gives you an option to split them automatically. Everything is in a folder - there is now way to miss anything.

Lyle

Reply to
Lyle Fischer

Jerry and others

With multibodies, comparing bodies (parts, at least) has become very easy for those who don't own SldWks Office, but there's one catch (there may be others, but I haven't found them yet)

When I want to compare an old version with a newer version of a part, I simply "Insert/Part" and subtract one from the other. The differences show themselves as you describe ....... BUT

What is not obvious is that subtraction of bodies doesn't work quite the same was as arithmetical subtraction: if you subtract a number from another, there is always a non-zero answer unless they are identical when you subtract a larger body from a smaller in SldWks, there is no remainder, 'cos negative volume (anti-matter) is considered not to exist.

So you have to do the subtraction both ways around to be sure.

background!

Reply to
Andrew Troup

Hi Edward,

You should look at SplitWorks, which also saves the different faces in different folders, and also has an automatic display of ALL open and closed parting lines - which allows you to recognize the undercuts immediately even if they are very small. This is very useful especially when you have real size parts and a small undercut face is stuck in the core or cavity side and the classification in different folders doesn't help.

Reply to
GNB

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.