Absolute Basic Synchronous Starting Point

I think all of the demos you’ve seen of Synchronous start in the middle. They assume you know a lot of stuff already. But I know you have a lot of questions, and this is why you’re skeptical. Obviously for a viable CAD system to really work, there are some basic things it has to do. I’m not saying it works exactly the way you want it to work, it probably doesn’t. But you’ve got a lot to gain by being open to a different way of doing things. The way you’ve been working since you started using history-based modeling is flawed and full of workarounds. Synchronous gives you solid tools to do things you haven’t been able to do before.

You’ve got to start by letting go of what you think you know about CAD. Do you remember abandoning 2D CAD to go to 3D CAD? That was a conceptual jump because you didn’t control the drawings directly, you had to make an accurate 3D model. And some people didn’t like that. But you learned that 3D was a better method than 2D.

The jump from history-based to synchronous is the same kind of conceptual jump. You’ve learned a very complicated way of doing things (programming feature processes as if they were lines of code in a computer program), and now I’m telling you there is a simpler way that allows you to do what you need to do more directly with less beating around the bush, or history-tree. You can combine techniques to get the benefits of synchronous and history. Just take my word for that part of it, and let’s start at the beginning.

The demos you’ve seen start in the middle. The don’t explain the simple concepts and don’t answer the really basic questions, like how do you make sure things don’t move? How do you make precise changes? How do you use sketches? Do you really throw away the idea of features? This last one is for the next video, but you’ve got to get answers to the simple stuff before anything else makes sense.

Anyway, I put together a short video to answer the simple questions.