Concept to Production: Edit, Reuse or Rebuild?

Mark Biasotti asked an interesting question over on the SW forums,

how can we  make SW better at reusing or carrying forward concept and prototype work to the final design.

This is another bit of advice you can give SW here if you haven’t already done so on the SW forum. Chime in in the comments and let your voice be heard.

Here’s my bit:

I hope that SolidWorks is not trying to develop a process for moving from concept to final model. SolidWorks is not really good at developing processes. I think they need to stay with developing tools and allow users to figure out how to fit the tool into the process.

In fact, I wish SW could just try to remember that they do build a tool, not some decorative gewgaw or fashion kit that changes with the blowing winds of trend. A suite of tools that needs to accomplish actual engineering tasks. Users should be able to string the tasks together to create their own workflows.

I think to do all of this, the single tool that needs to be most improved is the FeatureManager, this is the tool that presents the feature data to the user.

I receive data from a wide range of sources, and these sources all have different purposes for their concept models. Some are hacked imported data, some are simple representations of what will hopefully be a more complex developed model. Some are attempts (good or bad) at making a complex shape which I need to develop further. Sometimes I have to work from my own concept models, which might be something quick I put together for display only.

These range everywhere from yeah, I can use it with some tweaks to it just being easier to start from scratch. So we might as well talk about both ends of the range, since I think you’re going to need to accommodate both ends. I don’t believe there is a simple single answer to your question.

To be able to work with existing data, the biggest impediment right now with the software is the visualization and capabilities of dealing with consumed parents. Plus, several entities are dealt with different from the rest. Curves for example, are probably the most problematic, since they cannot be reused or shared between features, and once used by one feature cannot be referenced even by another sketch. There are several other problems with curves, though, which includes the poor accuracy of the curve compared to sketches, faces and edges. They really need to be on par with the rest of the entities in the software in order to work on the same data. And please don’t take that to mean that the rest of it needs to be more sloppy.

We also need the ability to show the FM as a single straight history based list of features, without stuff reordered or indented, and the ability to manipulate feature order in this state. The current Parent/Child window is woefully inadequate. It needs to encompass the entire model, not just the current feature. We need the ability to show which features do not have children, which don’t have parents, which don’t make any faces that show up in the model as currently displayed, and a Solid Map like “family tree” representation of the relationships between features in the tree.

I would really like to be able to reorder back and forth across the rollback bar, and also to suspend recalculation until you are done with multiple reorders and rollbacks. I’d like the ability to show multiple panels of the tree (stacked side by side), especially for long trees, so you can see all of the features.

Further, when recreating models that can’t simply be repaired, Solidworks needs the ability to copy sketches from part to part. Sketches, features, and groups of features and sketches complete with parents as necessary. When sketches copy, they should ALWAYS copy to the same relative position relative to the part/sketch origin, instead of using cursor position for some types of copy. Deleting parent featues (for example a plane or a feature that another feature is sketched on) should not delete the dependent feature. There are times now when that happens with no explanation, such as hole wizard revolved profile sketch planes.

You guys like automatic stuff, so how about something that will automatically reorder other features while you’re editing another feature. For example, I want a sketch to reference an edge, but that edge is consumed by a fillet. It would be nice to be able to move the fillet before the sketch (while the sketch is open) and continue on your merry way.

In order to make SW better at editing models, well, I think that’s going to be a lot of hard work that would mostly involve – and this is going to sound sarcastic, because it is – going back and fixing the software to work the way it was originally meant to without all of these silly and lame limitations that we have accumulated over the years. SolidWorks has so much unfulfilled promise. I really think the software needs to go back to having a single vision that drives the development, not the fragmented vision that leads to lots of half completed projects, none of which really completes the mission they started out on.

Focus, guys, focus.