Awkward modeling situations

If people kept track of all the awkward modeling situations they came across, I think it would be very instructive for software developers. I usually just shrug my shoulders and continue on, but today I decided I’d share some of these with you. Maybe someone has a good workaround out there that I’ve been missing.

The first one today started when making a dimensional change to an elliptical sketch used in a loft. For some reason the edge of the loft broke into multiple segments, causing a converted sketch to fail, which caused a planar surface to be incorrect, and a knit to be incomplete, blowing the thicken feature sky high. I was thinking it was March in Washington DC with all of the cherry blossoms.

So I had to rework the sketch without deleting anything. As bad as a regular edit can be, editing by deleting and recreating is 10x worse.

Anyway, due to these simple changes eventually a surface that used to be planar turned out to be non-planar. That sux because I’ve got 1000 things down the tree that relate to this the ONLY planar face on the entire model. So I have to create a plane on or near the face and move all of the dangling sketch plane sketches to the new plane. Of course the plane normal turns out to be flipped from the face normal, and so all my sketches turn over.

Next, mirror and delete face functions blow up because the additional edge in the planar face caused the face to get a different internal ID or whatever. These things were just workarounds because some other more direct route to getting symmetric model didn’t work last time I made an edit. 2I’ve got a whole tree of red to correct just because I changed the diameter of an inlet by 0.75 mm. This is a 2 hour modeling exercise. To make a simple change, all caused by one extra edge showing up in the model for no obvious reason.

What I really wanted to talk about was just something simple. A line on a plane, and I wanted to make the end point coincident with a perpendicular plane. You can’t do that. You can’t dimension from a plane that’s perpendicular to the sketch plane either. So I had to sketch a line on the plane, reorder the line, and then create a sketch relation.

Why do we have to do this kind of workaround? We use software that tries to automate lip and groove features, vents and will automatically dissect your model into a thousand sketches and features (!?!) and 3 different ways of getting shiny pictures from our models, but we are still in the cold for doing simple low level sketch relation type things.

What are modeling situations you’ve come across that seem like obvious and easy additions to the software?

And another thing. Why does it require a rebuild when I delete a failed feature? It doesn’t change the finished part at all, it doesn’t even work! You know, the direct modeling people wouldn’t have such an easy target of history-based modelers if the history-based modeling made more sense.

I’ve got an idea. Instead of trying to make tools that do the work for us that don’t really work, why don’t you just make tools that we can use for tasks that we need to do, and let us decide how to use them?

Oh, here’s another good one. Have you ever had a feature that failed, so you replaced it with another feature that worked, but the failed feature still had a bunch of child features that will also get deleted if you delete the failed feature? That one drives me batty. I’ve wasted hours and hours on that. Blame this on long rebuilds for this part I’m working on. I just blog while its rebuilding.

Here’s one. If you have a feature that is selected in the feature manager, and you select it again to show the Left Click context toolbar, it first shows the toolbar, then it switches to change name mode and the toolbar goes away. Even Microsoft had the sensibility to change the rename functionality in the folder window (left window in Windows Explorer) so that you had to actively select Rename from the RMB because too many users got into rename mode accidentally.

At last night’s user group in Richmond, one of the guys piped up and said “looks like it was programmed by somebody who doesn’t use it”. Bingo. Couldn’t agree more.

And another. If you want to change a sketch and change a feature, you have to first change the sketch, get out of the sketch, then change the feature. If the feature is rolled way back in the tree, you gotta do it twice!?!? How about giving the user control over rebuilds? For software with such serious performance problems, you’d think that they’d figure this stuff out. But no. We must think for you. You cannot possibly make good decisions. I’m tired of software aimed at the lowest common denominator doing things for me, especially when it doesn’t do what I want it to do.

And this. Why can’t you repair/reattach converted entities when they are splines? Why? To go ahead with your work with parametric relations, you have to delete and recreate!?! WTF?

More! In sw09 the display of sketches seems hosed up. Sometimes clicking on a sketch in the feature manager doesn’t show it highlighted in the graphics window. Sometimes double clicking it doesn’t show the dimensions. This one is on my new, totally compliant video card computer, as well as the two machines that previous SW versions have obsoleted.

Focus on basics. Don’t need no more shiny $#!+.