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!

Increase Your Design Productivity with Good SolidWorks Training

In our current high-tech era, SolidWorks users have put an increasing number of demands on the software, and Dassault has responded by enhancing this 3D parametric software modeler with significantly more capacity and flexibility than it used to have. For example, today, SolidWorks can run on a Windows virtual operating system on a Macintosh. It is designed for collaborative environments, and handles not only part design, but simulation specifically designed for many different industries.

While CATIA dominates the automotive and space / aeronautic industries, SolidWorks is the most popular 3D parametric modeling software worldwide, and also has significant representation in high schools, colleges, technical / vocational schools, and universities. You will be hard pressed to find a post-secondary school now not offering some SolidWorks training.

Many private firms offer excellent SolidWorks training, and there are hundreds of samples of SolidWorks training videos on free video portals like YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion. In fact, you can accumulate dozens of hours of free SolidWorks training by mining such sites as YouTube. Video-Tutorials.Net alone offers one hundred plus SolidWorks tutorials on YouTube, at their channel, videotutorials2. While you can study at a college, or at an in-house SolidWorks training facility, you get your best value for your money by working with a private tutorial vendor, where you can get hundreds of hours of SolidWorks training videos at a fraction of the cost of in-house SolidWorks training.

Self-study has the advantage of letting you study at your own pace, and from any computer or location of your choice. This flexibility makes self-study SolidWorks training more popular and effective than the more structured and formal types of training.

Where to start yourself study? Begin with SolidWorks essentials training, like sketching and drawing, part design, assembly design, and then once the basics are under your belt, branch out into the more intermediate and advanced areas like surface design and modeling, sheet metal design and modeling, simulation, PhotoView 360 (where you learn to make photorealistic images and animations / videos of your models, that you can share with customers, colleagues, and those in your supply chain), Simulation (where you test the robustness and effectiveness of your design / model in the environment where it will be used), Routing & Piping, Mold Design, Weldments and so on. Video-Tutorials.Net has SolidWorks training that offers numerous sample project files with which you can practice.