SOLIDWORKS Video Tutorials Supplements for Beginners: Mold Design Questions Part 2

Welcome back to our series of SOLIDWORKS video tutorials supplements for beginners. We’re still talking about some basic mold design questions. We were discussing working with shut off surfaces, where SOLIDWORKS patches a hole up for you, so that you can separate your mold into cavity and core.  Taking a look at the Resetting All Patch Types option at the bottom of the Shut off Surfaces tool property manager, we see four options: All, No Fill, All Contacts and All Tangent.

We’d left off right at working with the All Contacts selection. Now, if you’re thinking to conveniently use the All Contacts option in one shut off surface, and then use the All Tangents option for a second shut off surface, and that this will solve the problems in your model, think again! This won’t work because only one shut off surface feature is permitted per model.

After you click OK to accept the shut off surface, take a look at the feature manager design tree. Expand the surface bodies folder, and you’ll see two sub folders now. One is called Cavity Surface Bodies and the other is Core Surface Bodies. Let’s hide the surface in the Cavity Surface Bodies folder. Now, take a look at the ribbon—notice that the shut off surfaces tool is no longer available. It’s grayed out on the ribbon because we can only use one shut off surface feature per part, as you’ll remember.

This concludes our discussion of shut off surfaces, in our series of SOLIDWORKS video tutorials supplements for beginners. Stay tuned for our next article. 

Inventor Training for Beginners: Working With Appearances and Materials

Inventor gives you some pretty useful tools for manipulating the appearances and materials of your models. Inventor comes with enormous built in materials libraries. There is both the Inventor material library and the AutoDesk material library. You can pull in materials and appearances that you use more frequently into your favorites, for easy reference and access. You can also create your own custom libraries.

If you use the material browser, you also have easy access to the AutoDesk material library, the Inventor material library as well as your favorites. If you want to add a material to My Favorites, you just need to right click on any item and select Favorites. That’s it!

You don’t have to accept the material just as Inventor supplies it; you can definitely modify its color, texture and other physical properties such as transparency and so on.  From the appearance library, if you double click on any image of an appearance, the texture editor opens. We can adjust many aspects of an appearance’s texture prior to saving. You can also adjust the physical properties like scale, position, rotation angle and so on. We can also clear the appearances using the clear tool. Once you’ve made changes to a material or appearance, you can save it for future use. You can copy it to other parts or faces or features.

As you can see, working with materials and appearances in Inventor Training is made very easy by the appearance browser and the materials browser. We’ll be taking up this topic in greater detail in our next entry; stay tuned for more in our Inventor tutorials for beginner’s series.

AutoCAD Tutorials About Working With Arrays

In our previous entry in this series of AutoCAD Tutorials, we were still discussing arrays, and we left off with how to edit path arrays. You will remember that a path array is a pattern of entities, along a path that you define, such as a spline or polyline.

If you right click in the graphic area, the contextual menu offers additional editing selections for the path array. We can make it associative, set a base point, edit the number of items, the number of rows, the levels of the items, we can align the items, and set parameters for the Z direction. If we select Enter, we’ll close the tool.

To edit the array, just select it with a left click in the graphic area. You can change many parameters using the input fields at the top of the graphic area, such as the number of items, the total distance and so on. If you want additional rows of items to appear beside the first row, enter a numeric value representing the distance between the rows. To get the second row to appear on the other side of the first row, you’d just enter a negative number.

You can also adjust the base point. This is the point from which the array starts, as in the center of the first entity included in the array. When you readjust the base point, the path arrays will be positioned relative to the new base point.

At any point, you can type ARRAY EDIT in the command prompt to enter array editing mode, and you can also press F1 whilst in array editing mode to get additional help from AutoCAD.

This concludes this entry in our series of AutoCAD tutorials. We’ll finish up with arrays in our next entry.

How To Navigate Around The CATIA Interface - CATIA Tutorials for Beginners - The Specification Tree

In this next entry in our CATIA tutorials for beginners series, we'll learn about some of the navigation tools and other ways of getting around the interface. In this entry we'll talk about the Specification Tree. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a tree-like structure that is called the Specification Tree. This is a list of each feature its supporting geometry in your model. In CATIA, each item in your model has its own node, and you can edit each one right from this tree.

What's great about the Specification Tree in CATIA is that you can easily see how your model was built, and the order the features were created. It's your at-a-glance map of all of the work on the page. It shows you how your model was constructed, and this is the greatest way to reverse-engineer a model, by reviewing its nodes in the tree.  The feature tree is such a great and user-friendly way to display your model that all the other principal CAD software packages have adopted it, like SOLIDWORKS and Inventor.

The specification tree is basically your single most important navigation tool in CATIA. Every single item you create is recorded here, and all of the parent items have expandable and collapsible branches, where you can see all the supporting entities used to crate that item. You expand and collapse the nodes of the tree using the plus and minus symbols that appear next to the item name. Click the "plus" sign to expand the item. Click the "minus" sign to collapse the item.

This concludes this entry in our CATIA tutorials for beginners series. Stay tuned for our next entry, where we'll talk about other ways of getting around the interface. 

SolidWorks Tutorials for Beginners - View Manipulation, Part 3

Welcome back. This is a SolidWorks Tutorials series for beginners, and in this edition I'll be talking more about view manipulation. What the heck is view manipulation? It's the tools SolidWorks gives you to reorient your model in the graphic area. Panning it, zooming it, rotating, etc.

In my previous entry I talked about how the Zoom to Fit and Zoom to Window tools work, and how they make it easier for you to re-orient quickly. In particular, Zoom to Window is helpful for beginners, because, in the beginning, users tend to lose their model during the zooming in or out, since often they haven't trained themselves to keep the cursor centered on the model, ha ha!

By the way, if you don't see the Hang up Toolbar at the top of your graphic area (it appears top-center in the graphic area, right underneath the ribbon and right beside the environment tabs), you can make it visible via the Customize dialog window. You get to this by clicking the arrow next to Options on the Quick Access toolbar at the very top of your screen. It's near the right margin.

On the Customize window, go to the Commands tab. Click on the View category on the left hand side. Then, just drag in any tools from the collection of buttons on the right hand side. If you hover over any button, a small tooltip will appear that explains what the tool is.

The next tool on the Hang-Up Toolbar is Section View. This does what it sound likes; in letting you see a cross-section of your model. You get to choose which part to remove and which part to keep visible by dragging a handle that appears on your model in the graphic area, as soon as you click on the tool. Section View lets you observe the cavities inside your model.

Next we'll be talking about the many SolidWorks options for View Orientation. Staytuned for the next entry in this SolidWorks tutorial for beginners series.

SolidWorks Tutorials - View Manipulation, Part 1

Welcome back. We're continuing with the SolidWorks interface in this SolidWorks Tutorials series, and in this tutorial, we'll be learning about View Manipulation in SolidWorks. View manipulation refers to how you can reorient your models on screen.  SolidWorks gives you lots of tools for this. They are located on the Hang-Up toolbar, right under the command manager (that's the ribbon of commands at the top of your screen).

Figure 01 - The Hang-up Toolbar under the SolidWorks command manager. Here's where the commands that let you adjust your view are located.

Before we can manipulate our model, let's create a model! Right-click on the Top Plane in the Design Tree, and select Sketch:

Figure 02 - To build a model, we start with a sketch, of course.

I'll activate the Rectangle Tool and place the geometry in the graphic area:

Figure 03 - The Rectangle Tool on the Sketch Tab.

I'll click to place the first corner, then place the second corner when the feedback displays dimensions that are about 50mm x 50mm, as shown below:

Figure 04 - A rectangle about 50mm x 50mm.

When I release the mouse, SolidWorks' intelligence thinks I want to create a square and automatically applies Equal relations to the sides. Thanks, Dassault! Let's click Accept in the confirmation corner to save our work and exit Sketch mode.

Figure 05 - SolidWorks applies an equal relationship to all sides automatically. Confirmation corner is in the top right of the window.

When we accept the sketch, we land on the Features tab. We are now in part-modeling mode. Let's activate the Extruded Boss/Base command so we can create a simple solid:

Figure 06 - Here's the Extruded Boss/Base Property Manager. Click the up-arrow to increase the depth by 10mm increments. (You can change the default increment number in Options).

The first tool on the hang-up toolbar is the Pan tool. This is how you can drag your model around the screen, left and right, as well as up and down. It doesn't rotate your model (3D movement); it only moves it on one plane (2D movement). Notice how and when the Pan Tool is active, the cursor icon displays the pan symbol, as shown below.

 Figure 07 - The Pan Tool is active, since the cursor now displays the Pan symbol.

You don't have to hold down the left mouse button to pan; once you left click on the tool, it's active until you left-click on it again to deactivate it. The cursor icon will change, so you'll know that the tool is no longer active.

There are numerous mouse short-cuts that let you activate the view manipulation tools like this, without actually clicking on the hang-up toolbar. So, this is just another shortcut provided by Dassault to help you speed up your work, reduce your mouse movements and overall increase your productivity.  

When you hold down the CTRL key and the scroll wheel / middle mouse button at the same time, you activate the Pan tool without having to click on the hang-up toolbar's Pan Tool. 

You can use your middle mouse button, or your scroll wheel, for zooming in and out at any time, without activating the Zoom tool in the SolidWorks interface. When you're zooming this way, keep your cursor on your model, otherwise you'll zoom in on empty space in the graphic area.

When you select an edge with the middle-mouse button or scroll-wheel, you activate the rotate tool. The cursor icon changes to the rotate symbol, as shown below. This is how you can rotate a model around the selected edge:

When you press down and hold the scroll wheel or middle-mouse button at the same time, you activate the rotate command. This lets you move your model in 3D space, "turning it" the way you want to see the "other sides."

This concludes part 1 of our tutorialon View Manipulation, in this SolidWorks tutorials series.

The CATIA ToolBars for Beginners

CATIA V5 uses toolbar tailored to each environment to make it easier to find the appropriate tools. In this lesson, we'll be looking at some of these toolbar. Most CATIA tutorials will cover these toolbar, but in case you want a quick recap, here are my notes: The standard toolbar is available in any of the CATIA workbenches. From left to right, the tools are: New, Open, Save, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Help. To launch the part design workbench toolbar, you need to have a new part active. You'd choose the New button from the Standard toolbar, and then select Part from the New dialog.

The Part Design Workbench environment offers many toolbar, such as the View Toolbar. The View Toolbar contains all the commands you need to manipulate your view of your model. The commands from left to right are Fly Mode, Fly In, Pan, Rotate, Zoom in, Zoom out, Normal View, Create Multi-View, Isometric View, Shading with Edges, Hide/Show, Swap Visible Space.

There's also the Select toolbar and Sketcher toolbar, to speed up your selection of entities as well as your ability to activate drawing commands quickly, and your CATIA tutorials should definitely cover these. The Profile Toolbar is available in the Sketcher Workbench. From left to right, the tools are Profile, Rectangle, Circle, Spline, Ellipse, Line, Axis, Point. We use these tools to create geometric entities in our workspace.

Next is the Constraint Toolbar. From left to right, the tools are Constraints defined in dialog box, Constraint, Fix together, Animate constraint and Edit multi-constraint. We use constraints in CATIA to relate our geometric entities to one another, and to define the size of our geometry. This is what makes a CAD program different from a, for example, graphic design program--all entities have to be positioned in space, in relation to one another. This is for the obvious reason that a much higher level of precision is required for sketching when the results of your drawings are 3D machined parts, etc.

We use the Operation Toolbar to make adjustments to our sketches, like adding chamfers and fillets, or trimming and mirroring entities, etc. The tools, from left to right, are Corner, Chamfer, Trim, Mirror and Project 3D Elements. We’ll be picking up more from here shortly!