Relationship Counseling: Horizontal Modeling

Well, I hope you all are recovering from your holiday. All of the craziness of the season takes a bit of an emotional toll on me, and in the first lull after the Big Day itself, there is maybe a touch of post partum depression, or its next nearest equivalent. Of course that could just be too much turkey and stuffing too, who knows.

I’ve been writing this blog for a year and a half or so. I originally said that I didn’t want to just do tech tips, because that seemed to be what everybody else was doing at the time. I wanted to do a bit of an opinion site. People who knew me would expect something of that sort from me. So that’s what I did. I wrote reviews, opinions, crazy speculation, and a bit of a travel blog from time to time. My thinking was that with the book and all, I was kind of tired of writing about tech issues.

Things change. I look around at the SW blogs, and now hardly anyone is writing tech issue blogs. I guess it makes sense for me to add some tech issues back into the mix. If you’ve got a suggestion for something that’s a little off the beaten path, is kind of up my alley, isn’t covered in either the 2007 Bible or the surfacing book currently in the works, I’ll be glad to take it on, even if it takes a little research.

I had submitted an idea for a session at SolidWorks World 2008 that would have been called “Relationship Counseling”. It would have been half spoof, half bug report, half solid SolidWorks info. With three halves, I must have been planning on running over time. It’s probably a good thing the SW people lost my submission 3 times (once for each half, in an attempt at symmetrical irony), and instead finally asked for a fairly safe one that I have done at a few user group meetings (The original presentation used a picture of Michael Jackson’s head on Anna Nicole Smith’s body to describe the term “hybrid” modeling, which was considered a bit too racy for a conservative user group, so I proposed that I switch it to Michael Jackson as the Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, but that was also shot down.  Of course I didn’t need to ask if just showing a picture of Michael Jackson’s face by itself with the caption “Hybrid – an unnatural mixture of geranium species” would be acceptable. Some people just have no tolerance for silly satire.)

So the SolidWorks Relationship Counseling idea went nowhere. Someone else must be doing a spoof presentation at SolidWorks World this year and doesn’t want the competition.

The Relationship Counseling presentation was going to take as a starting point what some people have called “horizontal modeling”, which is just an over-complicated way of describing modeling with relationships pointing only to reference geometry and independent sketch entities rather than modeling to faces, edges and vertices. I think many people will be surprised to learn that the term (from another defunct link – http://delphi.com/manufacturers/dti/ddm/) “Horizontal Modeling” is a technique patented by Delphi in 2003. They have even written a (defunct link- http://delphi.com/pdf/dti/dcce/whitepaper_sept19.pdf) white paper on it along with Digital Process Design, which basically means you use the computer, an idea so novel Al Gore himself might have come up with it 40 years ago. The white paper is 8 pages long, yet somehow avoids saying directly what “HM”(TM) actually is. This is as silly as Autodesk pretending to have invented Digital Prototyping, and inventing the acronym PLM to mean “business processes you don’t need, but we can charge you a lot of money for anyway”.

A (now defunct link – http://www.designnews.com/article/CA328027.html) Design News article is somewhat less cryptic and more to the point about the whole topic. Also, a(nother defunct link http://techcon.ncms.org/01con/Delphi-Burke.pdf) Powerpoint-gone-pdf is available which again makes a lot of effort to avoid a simple and clear explanation.

This is what happens when you get too many people in suits together in one room without enough productive work to do. No wonder American automotive engineering is going down the tubes again. The whole thing is written by a PhD (post hole digger) who has the title of “Licensing Executive”. No new ideas so the poor fellow decides to patent common sense. That ought to be novel.

It looks like the guys over at (oh, rats another defunct 16 year old link – http://www.fcsuper.com/swblog/?p=5) SolidWorks Legion have also written about Horizontal Modeling. I think they took it more seriously than I have. No surprise I guess. I have to admit, I haven’t read through their whole article. It looks like someone is also giving a session on HM at SWWorld. It turns out that Relationship Counseling was only going to talk about horizontal modeling for about 15 minutes. Once you convey the idea of making relationships to reference geometry and sketches rather than faces, edges and vertices, there isn’t a lot left to say (which doesn’t answer why this blog is written in two long parts).

The rest of the presentation was going to talk about specific techniques in SolidWorks that could be used when you have to transgress the horizontal modeling dogma. I’m gonna save that for Part II. I know if I’ve written a single blog post longer than the window on my 24″ widescreen monitor, its probably too long for most people (including me) to read.