Surfacing Wishlist

At SolidWorks World in Orlando, Jon Hirschtick approached me with an idea. His idea was to get me together with some SW folks and talk about some functionality options. Maybe it got shot down for various reasons, who knows, but it never went anywhere. I was excited about the opportunity and started making a list of stuff. So here”s my list, feel free to add to it if you have an idea.

1. All surface types enable an “overbuild by 10%” option to avoid degenerate conditions in the final part geometry and tolerance problems at edges without requiring users to trim out degeneracies and rebuild. This would also enable you to model from edges more often. This would be especially helpful when building a surface from curves/edges. Mark B says “design intent is in the curves”, yet when you model from curves, there are too many bad consequences.

• Extend surfaces that just continue the curvature at the edge without trying to extrapolate changes in curvature. Too often you get a boomerang surface or something that goes a little way and then kinks beyond recognition.

• Splines the way they used to be before they started guessing curvature for you – the guesses are too often ridiculous. You can see this in Mark B”s demo, at the end of the spline, he gets a ridiculous bit of spline that pre-2009 splines never did

• Trim to work like extend in that you can pull back edges along U-V directions. Sometimes you don”t need to make a sketch to trim, you just want to pull an edge back a little, or pull back several edges at once in the same way that Extend works.

• Freeform is almost a beautiful feature, but the curves and points deal makes it ungainly. Make it work more like Rhino or SolidThinking or SurfaceWorks.

• Conic sketch entities give predictably smooth curvature. Splines are cool, but they make it so easy to make ugly, lumpy curves.

• Allow splines to be controlled by the curvature comb. The CC needs to be more than just an analysis device, it needs to be a control. It”s too hard to get what you want by guessing how to manipulate things to make the CC look right.

• Force a spline, loft, boundary or fill to avoid curvature inflection points. If you don”t want a dimple in a surface, you should be able to make a surface without a dimple, or egg carton or ripples, or whatever other convexity defect you can name by limiting the rate of change of curvature or min curvature. 

• Weighting handles all the way around Fill surfaces, with some way to communicate to users the contradictions of weighting handles near selected curves (curve overrides weighting).

• Split surface bodies in the same way that you can now split solid bodies. Now you must make a copy of the body, then trim both bodies. Also fix the Move/Copy Bodies feature to keep it from asking you if you really want to copy a body without moving it. I can”t think of a single time when I”ve seen this warning when it was useful in any way.

• Fix the Knit feature working like Delete Face in some cases. When you have split lines on a surface body and knit it to another surface body, or do something that results in a knit (like a fillet, replace face, fill, etc.) sometimes your split lines are deleted.

• Allow the ability to thicken faces of a solid without the need to offset or knit them first. Don”t ask why. There is no other way to achieve the same result.

• Every surface creation feature should have a Knit and Solidify option like the Fill feature. It is surprising that we are so far along without tools like this. Surface modeling tools in SolidWorks are pretty primative in comparison to the rest of the software. Edit: some additions  

• Symmetrical Spline handles. I would love to be able to select a point and tell a spline to be symmetrical about that point. 2D or 3D. Including handles magnitude and direction.     

• Eliminate teetertottering. You know when you pull on a point and the spline on the far side of the next point does the opposite thing? That”s what I call teetertottering. And I don”t like it. When working on say the Freeform feature, it is very hard to avoid this. I”d like to see SW do something to make this avoidable.  

• Symmetrical surface features. When you make several symmetrical spline profiles, and then the Boundary goes and makes some wacked asymmetrical thing anyway, that”s annoying.  You can tell the Freeform feature to edit the surface symmetrically. Why not other features?    

• Boundary and loft connectors. Boundary and loft connectors should follow some basic rules. Like symmetry, maybe sketch relations, maybe dimensions, maybe UV%/parameters. Connectors sometimes save my features, but sometimes they are monstrous to deal with. They don”t move when you want them to or move when you don”t want them to. They sometimes automatically form V shaped formations, which is very often a problem. Connectors need attention!

These are just a few things that went through my head one day while working on a model. If you”ve got ideas to add to these, or if you just want to add to the discussion, please leave a comment.