SolidWorks is very proud (and defensive) of their documentation process which they call “task-based”. To be fair, it has worked well enough for them for the training materials which generally are well rated. Task-based training means that you train people by giving them steps to perform in the course of a “task” of some sort.

There is a discussion on the SolidWorks forums on which fellow SolidWorks whipping-boy Ben Eadie’s comments have been removed by the moderator. I read Ben’s comments before they were removed, and I don’t think they were worthy of that kind of treatment. …

This is kind of in response to all of the great comments I got on the last post about independent contractors.

First of all, if you have a PE license, I recognize that the rules are different. I don’t have a PE because nothing I’ve ever been asked to do has ever even come close to requiring it. I did the EIT thing years ago, but never moved forward with it. Most of my work is in consumer and medical plastics.

I get people asking me, I guess especially more so in the past few months, how they can become an independent contractor. It’s really simple: just get people to hire you to do mechanical design type of work for short amounts …

A little birdie told me that SolidWorks 2010 beta is now available for download.

This is the most appropriate use for twitter: broadcasting notices in an opt-in sort of way.

Anyway, you don’t need to clear your schedule immediately, the download is large, so you won’t have it installed right away.

You’ve got to be on subscription to get it, but go to the customer portal and you should see a link there.

Devon Sowell and I were talking about stuff the other day. Devon is an independent like me. We do different kinds of work, but we share experiences and tips and offer support back and forth. I’ve got several other independent friends who specialize in machine design or mold design or industrial design, rendering and animation or things like that. The skills might overlap, but not by a lot.

I’ve had times when I was not able to do all of the work that came my way, and I would try to send some work to other folks. I try to suit the work to the person I send it to.

Anyway, Devon was wondering how many other independent people are out there …

Jeff Ray is the CEO of SolidWorks. Somehow, he just has not become the real spiritual leader for the software that Jon and John were. This is probably because he’s a business type, not an engineer. So when he has something to say about the future of the SolidWorks software, it seems maybe a little antiseptic, or distant or whatever. I don’t feel absorbed by his vision, maybe that’s the best way to put it.

So Jeff made a couple of appearances at user group meetings on the west coast, and Devon Sowell was there to capture some of what Jeff had to say.  Devon listed Jeff’s points, and I’m going …

Well here’s something to get excited about if you are me or a SolidWorks using Kindle owner. The 2009 Bible is now available on Kindle. I can’t say if this book does very well on Kindle or not because I’ve never actually used a Kindle. The images might be too large or too detailed or too grayscale dependent to show up well. The book is 9.2 x 7.4, and the Kindle’s display dims are shown below. It will only fit on the DX. I love the idea of the Kindle, and maybe now with the new larger size, it will start to do better.

Another possible problem is if it somehow enables …

First, if you haven’t done it already, go over to the Novedge blog and read Franco Folini’s interview with Matt Sederberg. Most of my blog readers should know that Matt Sederberg is behind the T-Splines surfacing technology that can now be used as a plugin in Maya and Rhino.
I believe that the T-splines technology is part of the future of surface modeling. I’m not really a NURBS expert, but I believe NURBS is an open source technology used to describe solid and surface geometry. I don’t believe it has any particular owner. …

This is what it’s all about. We can pontificate all we like without using the software, but give the software to a guy with a job to do and see what happens. This is a review on the Novedge blog of a fellow from SpaceClaiming forum… it’s a convoluted string of references, but the guy talks about his real experiences with the software in a real project.

To me, the main upshot is that he was not able to accomplish the entire task in a single software package. For some people that might be acceptable. I wouldn’t find it so. Anyway, follow this link and read it.

How soon? Real soon. I dunno, nobody knows, and if they did they wouldn’t say.

You are either self-punishing, uncurably curious, serious fanboy material or simply have too much time on your hands. It’s that time again. SolidWorks 2010 beta will shortly be available for download. I won’t be able to say anything else about it outside of the SW 2010 beta forums because of the non-disclosure you have to agree to when you sign up. You can remember back to SolidWorks World 2009, with all of the what’s new info that they put out there… Brian McElyea had some of the 2010 enhancements.

One thing you can do that …

What if you wanted to model a shape like this? where would you begin? This is certainly complex, but all of the faces are planar.

Well, this challenge isn’t an F-117, but it could be used as a study for where to start and how to proceed.  There are plenty of options, both solid and surface techniques that you could use for this kind of work.

Some of the things to keep in mind are that you can loft a solid from a closed profile to a point, but you can’t loft from a closed profile to an open profile (a line for example). The same is true of surfaces, plus you …

I don’t do this much, but I just wanted to make sure you all saw this Yahoo! article. I guess that in all the bad news, the news isn’t quite as bad for some of us as it could be. The#1 hardest to fill is engineer, and the #3 hardest position is technician, which also describes a lot of folks who use SolidWorks.

Matt Sederberg, the CEO of T-Splines has graciously offered to sponsor a little extension of our SolidWorks bottle challenge, and put something behind it. Matt is giving the winner of this contest a license of T-splines for Rhino. I don’t think that includes Rhino, just T-splines. T-splines for Rhino is a $549 value on the Novedge site. 

If you don’t know, T-splines is a complementary technology that bridges mesh modeling and NURBS modeling. (Matt, I hope I got that right.) It enables T intersections between faces where you are accustomed to X. Basically, allows a spline to only go part way across a face rather than requiring it …

In one of Dan Staples recent comments, he reacts against the term “dumb brep”. First, I need to explain brep. B-rep is “boundary representation”, which means basically the set of faces it takes to make a model. The faces exist in their “untrimmed” form so that some or all of them may be oversized. The boundary faces are a combination of the raw face data and the trim boundary edge.  So you can think of the b-rep as the collection of sheets of fiberglass used to make a fiberglass boat. The finished model looks just like a boat, but the b-rep includes faces that are larger than the finished piece. I’m sure that’s not a very good description, maybe Dan …

There is a good discussion going on about Direct Editing technology between Paul Hamilton, Deelip, Ken Wong, Ralph Grabowski, and CEOs of Think3, Alibre, a founder of Spaceclaim, and a lot of other folks on a number of different blogs. I think now that Spaceclaim has been around for a while, and Synchronous Technology has had the opportunity to make the rounds, the discussion has a bit of a baseline this time. Some of the pedants are not involved this time, so I think it is a more rational conversation. It’s a …

You know, I could just retire from blog writing and replace “AutoCAD” with “SolidWorks” in all of Steve Johnson’s posts, and just repost his stuff. Now he has written a nice piece on why AutoCAD for Mac is a BAD idea. Go read it. It may have all been said before, but I don’t think it’s so neatly put together and all in one place like it is there. 

And after you do that, Shaan Hurley, another AutoCAD blogger, wrote a little bit about the history of AutoCAD on Mac. The SW software copies AC so much, why shouldn’t the blogs?