Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

Aircraft are some of the most fun things to model. For whatever reason, I find them easier to model than cars. Maybe because they are so big, you are excused from a lot of detail. To the left is a SR71 Blackbird I modeled in about 4 hours, and rendered in PV360.

You can submit images or models. If you submit a model, I might analyze it a bit. I’ll be nice. If you just submit an image, it can be rendered or just a CAD screen shot. Please give some details about it, what sort of plane it is or if its your own invention. What software you modeled it in, what was challenging, what you learned.

I plan to do a P58 Mustang, and maybe an F4 Phantom. I’ve already done an F104 Starfighter and an F5 Tiger, which I’ll include in the submissions. Maybe we can include space craft, in which case I have a couple versions of the Enterprise (1701 and 1701D). Anyone have any Klingon or Romulan craft?

The purpose of this is mainly to show off your stuff, and share ideas and techniques. If you usually just let other people model stuff, why don’t you send something in this time. Someone will learn something from your efforts. You don’t have to put a huge amount of time into it. Let’s see what you can do.

At least one regular reader has already submitted a nice model, I’m just checking to see if I can post it here. Rick, you out there?

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The first entry is from Rick McWilliams. Rick spends his time on a sailboat going where the wind blows him and uploading SolidWorks data through a satellite link. So boats are kind of a thing for him. This model nicely integrates a boat hull into a plane. The top wing is not complete, but you can see there is some nice modeling going on here. Rick had some comments about his work:

The model has some useful concepts:
1. The first few sketches determine most of the geometry. Lines and curves from these are projected to become guide curves. Planes are mostly defined by these main sketches. Sometimes a short perpendicular construction line is added to make it easy to define a plane. The midline curve in the profile view is most useful to define the widest point in the fuselage. This curve is projected onto the edge line from the top view, and used as a guide curve for many surfaces. Make extras as the surfaces seem to consume these.
2. Boundary surfaces are often better than lofts when there are several sections. Lofts do not necessarily follow the sections. Lofts with just two sections usually work well.
3. Surface trims are often confused when a surface is changed. Mutual trims sometimes work very well and sometimes fail.
4. Smoothly intersecting surfaces may be generated by projecting profile or plan curves, and then splicing a planar curve. These are particularly useful for sensitive small angle intersections. Trimming small angle intersections is unreliable. I usually extrude a trimming surface from a plan curve.
5. Poor edge conditions are common. A surface that uses a curve projected onto a surface as a guide may not quite contact the surface and consequently trim or knit improperly. Extend surface can make the trim definitive. Alternatively create a trimming surface and trim one of the surfaces.
6. Boundary conditions for guide curves have unreliable results. Four sided boundary surfaces work better than three sided ones. I just hate the peaks and butt cracks that become obvious when the part is mirrored.
7. Once a group of surfaces is knit together fillets and rounds may be applied. I usually knit into a solid.
8. Split lines are wonderful. These divide surfaces into parts which can have different colors such as tinted clear for windows or colors. I use these last as they can interfere with features.
9. Configurations are very useful. Beware that constraints and dimensions may not be the same between configurations. This can cause features to do weird stuff. Sometimes I have to delete some configurations, and recreate them from an unbroken configuration.

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The next series of images are from Robert Bilbrey. This looks like a lot of work. Robert also had some comments to go along with the imges:

I have been alternating car and airplane models for some time now.  I find the “antiques” in both categories more interesting than their modern descendants in their variety.  Today’s aircraft designs, especially, seem hostage to more mature rules defining speed and performance and mission and thus have a certain sameness.

The attached were modeled in SW-09 and 10 and all were  rendered in Photoworks.  One important reason I don’t like PV360 for airplanes is that a background image is not visible through a transparent surface.
Such is the trick I use to simulate a “motion blurred” propeller.   I would be interested if anyone has a more effective or elegant solution to this problem.  Flying planes with static propellers are just plain ugly.  I sure hope this is fixed in the 2011 version of PV360.

The British WW2 Spitfire flying in formation was modeled and the F-16s were of the image (obviously).  I made the Nazi Folke-Wullf F-190 responsible for the World Trade Center tragedy.  I hope this historical liberty does not offend.

For those not familiar with pre-1945 planes, the twin engine job is a Beechcraft 18 dating about 1937 and used extensively well into the 1950s,  The prop blur worked pretty well on this one.  The twin-boom is a Lockheed P-38 WW2 fighter.  The biplane is a Stearman-Boeing PT-17 dating from about 1937 and used as an Army Air Corps trainer before and during WW2 ( yep, there was no independent US Airforce in them thar days. )

Beech 18 over Denali

FW-190D-9 OVER MANHATTAN #1

P-38 (PV-360)

SPITFIRE MK9 OVER SF

STEARMAN PT-17

Very nice work. It is hard to make renderings fit well into the background.

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Entry #3 is from Mark Reader.  The rendering is great. It’s good to have a little fun with what you do, and this one looks like Mark had some fun with it.

Mark Reader's toy Lear

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Matt Lombard’s -51d Mustang

And an F5 Tiger

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The next entry is a glider from Steve Farner. Click the pic for download. Here’s what Steve had to say about his model.

Attached is my first attempt at surface modeling (what little I know about this topic is from your “Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling” book – one of the best purchases I ever made). It is of a fairly historic sailplane, the Darmstadt D-36 Circe, and the intent was to create a fuselage model mold suitable for CNC fabrication of a mold for a 1/4 R/C model. The wings and tail surfaces are really more cartoons than well made parts…

The fuselage model was built from 3-views drawings and cross sections inserted as sketch pictures, and the necessary sketches derived from these. (I included this part with all its warts intact. You can see all my suppressed features, features that didn’t work, etc.)

Over, I was pleased with the way it turned out. I still have a lot to learn about cleaning up the little details and discipling myself to use better modeling modeling practices, but I was able to generate the g-code for the mold based on this model without too much difficulty. I should be able to lay up the actual fuselage pretty easily…

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Here is another from Rick McWilliams. I think this is my favorite so far. Great looking model. very nice! Click the image to download an eDrawing assembly.  Makes me wanna FLYYYYYY!

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Here are a couple from Sooraj Rajendran

I know, modeling an automobile is daunting. I almost dread starting a new car modeling project, even if it is just for fun. It took me weeks to get around to finishing the batmobile once I started it. But the actual work only took about 10 hours. I still have a couple of adjustments to do to this, but I’m a little hesitant to adjust much, since models like this tend to be fragile.

So for this challenge, submit models or renderings of models you’ve done. Or if an entire car is too much, just a car part. You could model a mirror mount, a hood scoop, rimz, a grille, steering wheel, a truck. I don’t know, just submit something. You don’t have to model something that actually exists, you could do your own concept car, or a cartoon car or whatever. The last challenge (mannequin) got pretty poor results, so we need to compensate.

In the coming week or two I will put up some posts about my experience modeling the batmobile, and try to go through each major component of the model. I’ve already started documenting some of the difficult areas, and areas in which SW performance was less than stellar. Overall, it’s a cool model, and I was able to do most of what I set out to do, so the software is capable.

I promised Matt Sederberg over at T-splines I was going to feature an automotive competition he held on his site. It took me some time to get around to it, but this is it. You can get some ideas for stuff to model from the t-splines automotive modeling challenge. There are some nice models over there. My favorite combined an old Firebird with the new Camaro. Nice…

I don’t expect the stuff here to look as nice as all that, but then I might be surprised. Tsplines and Rhino just make that kind of modeling easy. SW doesn’t. Drawing cars in SW is like doing chainsaw sculpture.

Looking for more SolidWorks automotive inspiration? Check out Paul Salvador’s stuff. Paul has done a lot of cool models – the very first nice Audi  models I saw, and this was at least 5 years ago. Paul does nice stuff. Check out the link.

Just as a side note, in making some of the images for this blog post, I used PhotoWorks and PhotoView360. I have to say that for all of the hoopla gone into PhotoView, I don’t care for it. It is slow to revolve your part, and severely limited in the kinds of backgrounds available. I know you can add your own, but I thought this was a dumb-it-down kind of product. I definitely need a dumbed-down rendering software. I think the main problem was that I could just never see the model very well in the PV, where the PW model stood out clearly. Anyway, I’m not a real renderer, so what I think about that stuff may not count. Just for reference, the one at the top of this post is PhotoWorks, the one at the bottom is PhotoView. PhotoView images all appear to be dunked in oatmeal.

Also, I want to put you on notice that the next modeling challenge will be an aircraft, so you might want to get started on your favorite WWII or Vietnam jet.

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Entry #1 is from Robert Bilbrey.

These renderings were done in Photoworks 2010.  I also find most of PV360 difficult and “fuzzy” although some of the textures and manipulation tools are useful.    The car is a 1953 Jaguar XK120 ( one of which I years ago sold for pennies, dammit ).  It was one of my earlier surfacing attempts and I can see flaws that could be remedied.

Nicely done! I love the old Jags!

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Entry #2 is from Fernando Mota. Renders done in Hypershot, PV360 and Vray:

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More models from Fernando Mota, modeled in Rhino, rendered in Hypershot:

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Entry #4 is from Mark Biasotti:

Couldn’t resist.

Modeled on SW2003 Beta 1  Rendering using Modo 401.

You know, I’ve always kind of admired people who have the patience to model a car’s interior. I just don’t have that kind of patience. I mean where do you stop? Detail is the most expensive thing you can add to a model. Some times it pays off, and sometimes it’s just useless detail. A car with an interior is more believable.

Anyway, Mark’s Vanquish has always been one of my favorite SW models. very cool, and thanks for sharing.

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Entry #5 is from Ben Paprocki:

Here are a few things I’ve worked on.  The first two images are of a car I’ve been tweaking over the past couple of years.  As with most projects, it’s never quite done.

Second is a rendering that I submitted to the CSWP SWW2010 design competition.  It took second place.

All of the images were rendered with PV360.

Nice stuff! Thanks for sending it in!

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Entry #6 is from Steve Ostrovsky, a reseller from the south east.

This is a PV360 rendering of a truck wheel and tire I modeled. Thought it would fit in with your current challenge.

I also attached 2 more that are a little off the beaten path – both done in PV360. They’re still vehicles, but … I was just having fun.

These are fun. I love anything with Marvin the Martian. And that toy tractor in that surreal barn photo?!? Fantastic. You gotta have fun with this stuff. Thanks, Steve, this is great stuff.

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Entry #7 is from Matt Lombard. Some of my old stuff I just wanted to include here.

The cobra was done for the Surfacing Bible as an example of surfacing over a scanned point cloud. It was rendered in Hypershot.

The F1 car was done for the Happy Valley user group presentation, and rendered in Photoview360.

This Porsche 911 model only had a brief life on display back in 2004. It was never quite finished, but somewhere along the way, someone made fun of it. When I look at this today, it really isn’t a very good model, and doesn’t look much like a Porsche. I love the 911, though, so I might take another crack at making a decent model. Rendered in Photoworks. I show it here mainly as proof that a user can really improve if they put their mind to it.

This model was also done for the Happy Valley user group, and rendered in Photoview 360. This is probably the best PV rendering I have made, and it was also one of the first.

Same model as above from Photoworks with a cool paint material that has a two tone effect (works like shining a light of a different color on a part of the model).

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Entry #8 is from Rob Wolkers from The Netherlands with a model that is probably pretty familiar to most SW users by now:

Great topic, some pics of my Burton Elementz.

Modeled in SolidWorks 2007 and rendered in Photoworks.

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Entry #9 is from Pawel Keska. Several great looking models!

I attached couple of my renderings. Each model was done in SolidWorks, rendered in PW or PV360.

There is nothing that will make you forget the problems of the future better than building a difficult model and dealing with today’s problems. Talking about modeling is so much more fun and productive than talking about potential future screw-ups. The present has enough screw-ups for me. I’m trying to break out of this crazy c___d spiral that we’re stuck in, but I just can’t complete this model. When finished, we will have another modeling challenge and another series of posts on surface modeling like when I did the Model A. We (I) need a change in direction.

So as a distraction, can you identify the item in the image to the left, and who made it famous?

Back in 1998 I submitted an assembly model to what was then the SolidWorks Library, and they posted it. The model was terrible, and didn’t really have any endearing qualities, wasn’t easy to pose, was over 6 feet tall, and didn’t much look like a real human. And then there’s that silly smirk. Much to my embarrassment, you can still find this model on the 3D Content Central site.

The challenge this time is to make a model better than Matt’s. It shouldn’t be hard. You get bonus points for making it easily poseable, making it look human, sized like a human, and even variable sized.

I will post entries and descriptions here in this post. Make it as realistic as you like!

If you want to download this one, you can get it on 3d Content Central, just search “mannequin”.

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The first entry is from Rick McWilliams. This is a really nicely done mannequin with poseable parts. It is reasonably realistic. It is all set up as separate bodies in a single part file, then in separate configurations, each body part is put into the assembly and mated. It only needs two files, the one part where all of the parts are created and the assembly that puts them all together.  It doesn’t appear to have separate sizes.

Very nice mannequin!

To download the files, click on the image.

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Is that – George Lucas – frozen in – Carbonite? Oh, the irony! No doubt its Han Solo’s payback for Lucas making Han a plaything for that disgusting slug Jabba. The Princess was surely my favorite of Jabba’s playthings, but I don’t think we’re ready for that modeling challenge.

In fact, modeling George’s mug might be a bit too much too.

Rick McWilliams and Charles Culp have made suggestions for posts here that I’m going to combine into this challenge: Make a human-ish face in SolidWorks using the Freeform feature.

Rick actually thought we should do a full mannequin (which I will get to in not too long), and Charles thought we might challenge the idea that Freeform is useless. I don’t suspect that Freeform will be totally vindicated by us, but it will give us a little practice and help identify the limits of the tool.

I haven’t spent a lot of time modeling human forms, and haven’t spent a lot of time using this type of push-pull functionality in Rhino or mesh modelers either, but here is a face-ish shape I made in about 20 minutes. If I can submit mine, you can submit yours too. Lets see what kinds of faces people make with Freeform. Send your model via email to matt at dezignstuff dot com. I started from a revolved surface, but you can start from whatever you like. It might be a better idea to start from a lofted surface, which is closer to the actual shape. Anyway, let’s see what you’ve got!

This is an entry I did just to start the conversation, really. I’m not sure this is great advice when working like this, but I try to place curves in groups of at least 3. The reason for that is to counter the “teetertotter effect”, which means that if you pull up a point, the areas around it will go down, pivoting about a point like a teetertotter.

The other trick is that you can avoid placing points if you just have a lot of curve intersections. SW automatically places a point at every curve intersection.

I don’t do a lot of this kind of work, so editing a shape directly in 3D is not an instinctive thing for me. I suppose most SW users are in the same boat. I wouldn’t even know where to start creating a list of “best practice” suggestions to help you get the shapes you want to create with this sort of method. The only way to get to that is to work with it and to learn from other people who work with similar tools in possibly other 3D software.

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Entry #1 is from Jason Knox. Jason started with a single lofted surface and then applied several freeform features to the same body. This is a technique I’ve been tempted to try because it allows you to lock in the result from one freeform, and then move on and make some additional changes, without separating the surface into multiple bodies, with each feature affecting a separate body.

This stuff is tough. It doesn’t look very easy, but I think it is actually more difficult than it looks.

I’d like for more people to step up and try this one. Maybe getting a few entries up will encourage people to give it a try.

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Entry #2 comes from Mark Reader. Mark started from a lofted surface, and mirrored it twice, then used a series of trims, fills and freeforms. This points out one of the more recent developments in freeform, that you are no longer limited to a 4 sided patch.

Here was Mark’s email reaction:

My first reaction to this was “uhhh….I’d rather set my hair on fire” having been burned by the freeform tool in the past and swearing off any future use. But here’s a little swipe at it.

This stuff is really tough in SolidWorks. As much as anything, these modeling challenges serve to show us where the limits of the software really lie. But then, maybe we as mainly mechanical designers and engineers are up against our own limitations as much as anything. The point that other software packages are able to do this kind of work, but if we aren’t used to working like this, maybe better results are still achievable with the current tools but a different set of experience.

My gut tells me that the SW freeform tool is a nice start, but that it could be easier to work with. Setting up the grid of curves and points is in some ways necessary and in some ways very limiting.

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Entry #3 comes from Pawel Keska. (My apologies to Pawel for misspelling his name in one version of this post!)  Pawel just sent an image, so before you ask for this model, I don’t have it. This is the best stuff I have seen which at least partially uses Freeform. Look for Pavel’s comment at the end of this post.

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Entry #4 comes from Pawel Keska. Again, nice figure sculpting, especially using SolidWorks.

Maybe Pawel could give a little description of how he accomplished these models.

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Entry #5 is also from Pawel Keska. In this one he shows his feature tree, with several Freeforms, Deform, Flex, Loft. Nice work. Not really a face or a figure, but at least an application of the Freeform feature.

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Entry #6 comes from Rick McWilliams. The head was made in several features, and then Freeform was used to tug and pull it into a face. Nice looking job! This is actually two faces in one. The gray side was done using the Boundary feature, with a grid of sketches. The pink side was done with an initial loft, and then freeform to add some detail and make it look like a face.

Click the image to download the file.

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Entry #7 again from Pawel Keska. This again is a face in relief (flattened), which is at least as difficult as making it fully 3D. I’m just kind of amazed at what Pawel has been able to make this software do.

Pawel used a version of SW previous to 2010, but I’m not sure which one. In 2010, a Deform feature at the end of the tree fails. He used the Point method in the Deform feature on one of the ears, which should work somewhat like Freeform, but with less control, I think. Click on the picture to download the SolidWorks file for this. It is fascinating to see how Pawel managed to do this.

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Entry #8 is from Florian. Florian wrote this about his experience creating this model:

I started at first with trying to loft the general form of a round head but failed horribly due to a lack of concept. I think it would be possible though, to add a bunch of 3D sketches like CT slices combined with front and side view and then form out a more general shape. If I would have to do a manequin, I guess I would approach it like this to keep nice and round surfaces. This face though, I created from a plane and used the freeform tool in different steps, to approach the result. I guess I could have done it in one step, but I thought it was suitable to “save” in between. I started using just a very few lines and points for forehead, nose, cheekbones and chin, because its really hard and time consuming to add “nicely” shaped surfaces when you have too many points. For the details, I added more lines in order to be able to modify just a specific area. It is quite hard to foresee what happenes to all the points in vicinity, so it was more a guess and check and slowly approaching what I thought was ok looking. I think I could have spend hours longer to try and see whats happening, just playing around with more or fewer lines and points, but I think you see where its going. I got a little lazy after a while  and decided to mirror the part and mediate a bit with a loft in the middle area. After all, symetry is beautyful right? The eyes were really nothing good, so I made it more like a mask – ok, chicken. I think it somehow ended looking like one of those little figures from the Settler’s

Very nice model, and thanks for sharing!

On the SolidWorks forums, Mark Biasotti has asked that in the interest of improving the SolidWorks software, users should come up with cases in which the new Plane interface does not allow you to create any type of plane definition you can imagine.

Matt,

What about starting with the premise that you should be able to create a ref plane thru ANYTHING that a plane can go thru.  If we can’t, its a bug.

So far, these are the types of planes I can’t create with the new plane interface:

1. you can’t orient the horizontal and vertical of the plane, so it is not really fully defined.
2. if you have a starting plane of a sweep at an arbitrary orientation to a curve, and want to make a plane at the other end of the curve with the same orientation relative to the curve
3. if you want to make a plane parallel to the current view at a given distance from a selected object
4. if you want to make a plane touch the 3 lowest points on a  3D curve
5. if you want to make a plane tangent to 3 spots on an eggcrate surface (make a floor that the surface would sit on)
6. if you want to make a plane tangent to an ellipse
7. if you want to make one plane at some percentage of the distance between two other planes
8. if you want to fill the space between two existing planes with X number of equally spaced planes
9. if you want to create a center plane for a set of point cloud (Scan To 3D) data

I know we have some inventive geometrical geniuses out there who can come up with more situations. My point is that no system is unlimited, so just tell me what the limitations are, and I’ll be able to solve a lot of problems. Anyway, lets see what kind of plane definitions that should theoretically work, but SW won’t let you make them. SW has thrown down the gauntlet. Who will pick it up?

(This is all in good fun, mainly a mental/geometrical exercise meant to drive home the idea that inventive people are greater than software limitations).

Some things are more difficult to model than others. Some seem simple, but when you go to do them, they aren’t.

Here’s a helmet I did several years ago. The helmet wasn’t easy, but the scoops all around it were less easy. Blending the brim of the helmet was another trickfor another time, but let’s just look at those airscoops for now.

Here’s the modeling challenge for this time around. Start with a sphere, and make some scoops on it. How many different ways can you actually make work? Remember to use zebra stripes and deviation analysis to get a feel for how successful you were. Submit models to my email at matt at dezignstuff dot com. I will add screen shots of all the attempts along with a little commentary. Let’s see how many methods we can come up with.

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Ok, the first entry is from Mark Biasotti of SolidWorks.

Mark’s entry has a surface with double curvature, and then a cut that is driven by a directional sketch. Mark’s part also uses an atomic bomb fillet in the corner, shown here in cross section.

This is a fairly simple approach, and gives a bottom of the scoop with a planar face rather than a double curvature face. It is also a solid approach, as opposed to a surfacing approach. So you can keep this in mind if you have to do a scoop as a solid rather than using more tedious surfacing commands.

One thing I want to call attention to in this model is Mark’s use of Surface Cut features. Notice that he is using planes to cut the solid model. This is maybe not a well understood function of the surface cut feature, but its very useful, and extremely stable.

Thanks, Mark!

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Entry #2 is from Ben Paprocki. This is another solid approach.

In this part, Ben used a revolved cut to make the scoops. Revolve cuts create scoop surfaces with double curvature, but in this case the curvature is constant in both directions (although it is different in the two directions). This kind of technique works great on a spherical shape, but not on a more general complex shape where the curvature varies in both directions.

Nice model, and thanks for the submission, Ben!

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Entry #3 is from Ben Bailey. This is a surface approach.

This is closer to the approach I would choose. Nicely done. Click the image to download Ben’s file. In this case he did the thicken basically to get the edge for the low side of the scoop. There are other ways to do this, but this certainly works. Then he made a boundary surface from the blend edge to the edge created on the offset surface. Each model submitted gets better. In this case, the main thing I would improve on would be to not make the scoop go down to a feather edge, but rather to thicken the entire outer shell, such that the scoop face would have the standard thickness as well. But this way is certainly valid. Download the SW file and check it out.

The only modeling criticism here is that there are some areas where the tangency didn’t work. See the edges on the lower side? They don’t show with a phantom line, meaning they are not within the tangent tolerance. The Deviation Analysis shot below demonstrates “how” out is out.

I would probably eliminate a split line feature, and make the entire curved section with a single boundary rather than two boundaries and a loft. Loft is said to be less accurate than boundary.

This is really picky criticism, by the way, but its the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night sometimes. How much does stuff like this matter? Depends. If you’re a perfectionist, everything matters. If you’re going to polish the mold a lot, it might be detail that just costing you a lot of money. You have to make this kind of judgment when you start working on complex models. Do you have to make it 100%? 90%? 70% How good is good enough?

Very nice job, Ben!

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Entry #4 is from Fernando Mota. Wow. Nearly perfect. Fernando did 2 models that were both nearly perfect. A lot of work went into the first model for sure. Let’s look at the first model.

This is a fully surfaced example. The scoop face is built simply from two boundary profiles. Keeping the profiles simple is one of the best ways to get a natural looking smooth surface.

The sides of the scoop are boundaries. Again, just the way I would do it.

Fernando did a really nice trick with what appear to be fillets, but are not fillets at all. Because fillets are made from a circular section, they only give c1 transitions (abrupt change in curvature) to the faces around them. You can only get a c2 transition (smoother change in curvature) by using a spline section. SolidWorks can only do spline section fillets if you use a face fillet with hold lines, I believe. What Fernando did was the manual equivalent of creating c2 face blends.

First, he swept a circular tube around each edge he wanted to fillet. Notice that the ends at the top, where all of the faces blend back into the main face would end in an infinite radius fillet because theoretically all of the faces are tangent. This type of thing is almost always a problem for SolidWorks. So the fact that Fernando did this manually rather than relying on the Fillet functionality was definitely the right decision.

(Another method would have been to knock out holes at the ends where the fillet would come down to a point, and then fill the hole later. This is the technique used by Mark B in the first entry, and is called the “atomic bomb” fillet, because it was originally considered to be massively overkill, but definitely fixed whatever modeling problem you were trying to avoid.)

After sweeping the tube, he used the tube to trim the surrounding surfaces, which essentially gave him an equal offset edge all the way around, and a clean edge at the top straight line transition. Then he just used boundary to fill it all in. Very clean.

Click the image to download the part.

Below is the image of the deviation analysis. Congratulations, that’s great.

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Entry #5 is also from Fernando Mota.

This model is much simpler, and I think just as valid as the first one. It is a bit more flowing, but uses less control. Or I guess it uses the benefits of the boundary feature instead of being more direct and manual about the fillet and blend from the main surface to the scooped surface.

In this case Fernando created the scoop face, trimmed back the outer and scoop face, then just blended directly from the outer edges to the edges of the scoop, with no need for fillets. To me, having fewer faces in a model is something to try to achieve. If your goal was a more flowing surface, this would be the way to do it. If you needed to look a little more faceted, or controlled, his previous method would be better.

Again, click the image to download the SolidWorks part.

This part again shows an excellent Deviation Analysis.

Great job, Fernando!

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Entry #6 is from Mark Rizzuto.

One of the things I’m looking for here is alternative methods, and Mark has provided that.

This is a solid technique that was performed on a flat part, and then the flat part was hit with the Flex feature to create some curvature.

Here’s what Mark had to say in his email.

Hi Matt!

Big fan, read your surfacing book and have followed your blog for a couple months now. Never submitted anything to the modeling challenges before, but this one intrigued me. After several sub-par attempts, I settled on a pretty simple approach and think it turned out ok. If I had more expertise with either the Flex or the Deform features, I probably could have turned out something pretty nice. Let me know what you think.

I add that to spur someone on. There is a technique you can use with the Deform feature that Mark mentions that might help you create a feature like this. If no one comes up with one, I might just show it myself. I’d like to see a few more entries here. These have all ben very nice models.

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Entry #7 is from James Canney. James used the Deform feature in a way I don’t commonly see. He made a solid body and used it with Deform, Surface Push setting. It’s kind of like denting a car door by kicking it. It’s not a very precise or controlled method, but it does give a smooth result, and it will work on any type of shape, regardless if it is single or double curvature.

Nice job with an interesting technique. Thanks for the submission, James!

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Entry #8 is again from Ben Paprocki.

This is a bold use of the Deform feature. It’s not that successful, but it is bold.

SolidWorks has created some tools that are nearly useless for real world modeling. They are close, but not really ready for use on production models.

In this example, Ben is pushing the limits. I definitely am impressed with how good he made this look. The fact that it’s still messy is not Ben’s fault, it’s a limitation of the tool. Look at this zebra stripe display:

See how the stripes are very jagged? All of the surrounding stripes are very smooth, but the stripes in the deformed areas are jagged. This points to really uneven curvature. It looks like a dent in your car door that you tried to bang out with a small ball peen hammer. I was going to use the Curvature display, but that looks bad even on good surfaces.

Here’s how Ben created this feature:

The Curve to Curve Deform option is better than the surface push when it is used to drive existing edges. In this case it was applied right in the middle of a face. I am amazed that Ben got it to look this good, because it only gets nasty as you get very close to the face. Notice the shape options at the bottom of the propertymanager. This is what allowed a very narrow sketch line to make such a wide indentation. The way it works is that Ben told it to deform the split out face area from a sketch that was on the existing surface to a new sketch that represented where he wanted the face to go. In reality, this is a direct editing tool, because it can operate on any geometry, native or imported. Other CAD packages have tools that function somewhat like this that are called Global Shape Modeling. It manipulates existing NURBS data.

This is a cool tool, but unfortunately, it is prone to stuff like this, with the tiny little ripples in the face. It is neither very controlled nor very smooth. If SW could develop this some it might be more usable. Great example of this kind of functionality, though, Ben!

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Entry #9 comes from Matt Wallace. This one is very interesting, a very different approach. Matt used a combination of solids and surfaces. The scoop face was a loft from an inner to an outer edge, and then he made a solid body, lofting from the scoop face to an outer face. Right, you can loft from a face to a face to create a solid.

Anyway, then this lofted body was used to indent a constant thickness solid.

Indent! I love the indent feature! This is a cool usage, and another technique we have not seen before. Cool. Thanks, Matt W!

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Entry #10 comes from Itai Lewin. This is a surface approach, with the major feature being the Flex. Itai created the tombstone shape, and then used flex to bend it down. Then the gaps along the side were filled with a lofted surface. The Zebra stripes display of this one looks good, and what I like most about it is that it doesn’t create a split face where you want it to be smooth.

Nice job using a difficult feature to get good results from!

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Entry #11 comes from James Canney. James used a solid sweep to indent a surface body. Excellent. I wasn’t even sure you could do that. This model has some examples of things that can go wrong even when you do everything right. These are some of those things you are just powerless against sometimes, or might lead you into crazy workarounds.

James did a nice job at everything. He even used the atomic bomb fillet technique at the corners of the fade, which are the most problematic areas on parts like this. The problem is that even though the features are symmetrical, one side splits and the other does not. This kind of thing is frustrating. You have to go back through and make sure things are exactly symmetrical, and then maybe see if you can get acceptable results by mirroring the body that didn’t split.

Ugh. That’s heartbreaking when stuff like that happens. I have no idea why, and can’t come up with a way around it except by trying a lot of different things.

Anyway, the second thing that went wrong here was with the thicken feature. Sometimes when you thicken a face, SolidWorks breaks it up into a bunch of smaller faces. This is usually because SW thinks the curvature in areas of the face is larger than the thickness of the thicken feature. That gives you stuff like this:

The most worrying things here are the little spikes. Sometimes with junk like this you can use Delete Face to get rid of all the little slivers, and just replace them with a single fill feature that’s nice and clean. If it did this in one direction, if you turn the thicken in the other direction, it might not fragment in the other direction, but there is no guarantee. The part was thickened to the outside, and the outside in that area is where the smallest radius is.

Anyway, nice part, cool techniques, and lots of stuff to look at.

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Entry #12 is modeled by Juan Santocono of T-splines, but submitted by Matt Sederberg. Here’s what Matt had to say about this challenge:

We’ve bookmarked your blog, and can’t stay away from your contests since I think they’re one of the best sources of testing T-Splines against freeform CAD workflows. Feel no obligation to post our entry, since this wasn’t created in SolidWorks, but since we created the model we thought we might as well send it to you, and feel free to share it if you’d like.

This was done by our designer Juan Santocono using T-Splines for Rhino. You’ll notice two of the models have smooth, fillet-like edges and one has sharp creases.

The models were made creating a NURBS surface from curves, rebuilding it and converting to a T-spline, deleting some faces, merging and welding some new faces on the sides of the fade, and control point manipulation to get a smooth topology.

Hope you’re well,

Matt

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Entry #13 is from Eric Irwin. This model was originally part of something else, as the in-context offset shows. This example builds up the scoop with surface features while the rest of the part is solid, and then uses a replace face feature to incorporate the surface body into the solid body.  Good work, and a nice looking fade. Thanks for sharing models!

I’m out of time today for a full length blog post, but I just wanted to get this up quickly. We talked about this kind of modeling in an earlier post, and I wanted to try my hand at it. I tried two approaches, and the first one didn’t produce a method that worked. The second approach worked, but the results are not perfect.

Just to pique your curiosity, this has about 40 surface lofts made from a single 3D sketch, with required knits and trims, and took about 90 minutes once I got things figured out.

Also, this shape is very difficult to visualize correctly, precisely because the concepts of stealth work, even on a computer screen.

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 can loft a surface from a line to a point.  If you have a 3D wireframe, you can loft the faces of the wireframe using the wireframe itself, whether it is curves, 2D sketches or 3D sketches.

You could also make a series of planar surfaces and trim them to enclose a faceted solid. You have seen competitions in different places to create mathematical forms such as icosahedrons.

Here are some simplified sample faceted parts I created. What kinds of faceted parts can you create, and what are the methods you use? Can you recreate these shapes? Send your entries to matt at dezignstuff dot com.

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Entry #1 is from Garrett Brooks. Garrett modeled a bucky ball. There have been various contests and tutorials on how to model these constructions on the web and forums.  In this case, Garrett chose to build a planar surface from a sketch, then a plane from the sketch, and a couple of planar surfaces, along with some patterning.

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Entry #2 comes from Phil Sluder. Wow, I dare you to follow along with this one.

1. Extrude a box
2. Loft a series of surface bodies to create the wedge shape solid inside the box solid, using edges from the block and a single shared sketch only for the first two, then edges for the rest
3. Shell out the wedge shape solid
4. Loft solids from inside face to outside face of the shelled wedge, without merging.

Very interesting technique. Click the picture above to download Phil’s part.  Here’s what Phil has to say:

Your latest blog is one of my favorite SW subjects. Curvy surface stuff
where the curve is y = m*x + b. Here is a really simple example of a
technique without starting with a whole bunch of sketches, and also shows a
neat way to break up the part into mitered sheets (useful if your part will
actually be built out of sheet goods). I have used these techniques on
several faceted speaker enclosures in the past.

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Entry #3 comes from Alexander Fee.

This part was built originally as an assembly, and then saved as a part, which is why each panel appears as a separate imported surface body.

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Entry #4 is from Bruce Buck. Bruce created a series of intersecting faceted lofts. This is a nicely done model, it looks like it is a few years old, from 2005. This is a great model to download and examine. Bruce did a nice job, much nicer in fact, than the next model down the list…

Notice that the Shape feature has a warning on it. This is not a modeling error, but rather a warning from SolidWorks Corp. The shape feature will be removed in SolidWorks 2010. Anything you could do with Shape you can do better with Freeform or Dome.

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Entry #5 is from Matt Lombard. This is one that I did when I worked for a reseller in NY probably in 1998. The customer did some decorative glass, and this was meant to show what could be done. I don’t have the actual SolidWorks file for this part any more, but it was done by lofting a diamond sketch to a point, and then patterning that around,  using the V between adjacent diamonds to make a plane for the next diamond.

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Entry #6 is from Andy Hall. Notice Andy starts out with a combination of 2D and 3D sketches, and then builds surfaces from the sketches. Andy has chosen to use the Fill surface, which is a good choice. I think in cases where Fill is bounded by coplanar curves, it actually produces a Planar surface. Click the image to download the part.

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Entry #7 again from Andy Hall. Again driven by sketches, but this time uses a single loft and multiple patterns.

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Entry #8 is from Matt Sass. This is done with a series of 2D sketches and planes, with planar faces. I always assumed this would be done with 3D sketches, but I guess it depends on the type of data you have to work from. This is a nice model. Download it and see how he did it.

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Entry #9 is from Ales Svoboda. This one was created in a version of SolidWorks prior to 2009 (I know because of the yellow circle with the exclamation mark on the Save icon). When it opens, it also loses its color. This is a long standing bug, that maybe Deelip can look into for me. SolidWorks probably assumes that people will be less concerned about this as fewer old version files will be converted over time.

In this one, Ales lofted between straight lines in two sketches to create flat panels. One thing I’d like to point out here is that you don’t need to use straight line guide curves if there are just two profiles with no end conditions. The default is a straight line guide equivalent. Kind of like a Ruled surface.

Ales make great use of the Selection Manager in this example. You can’t really see it unless you watch the selection process, but the upshot is that you can use sketch segments from various sketches. It’s kind of like a Composite Curve feature (composite curve is likely to be removed from the software in the future).

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 to go all the way. Go to the Tsplines site, they explain it a lot better. 

So, Matt selected me to judge the contest because I hosted the SolidWorks challenge. I want to show you these models, and then go back and look at the bottles made for the SolidWorks bottle challenge. Do you notice a difference between them? To me the difference is that the T-splines bottles are much more daring. Granted, the manufacturing, marketing and money aspects of some of these models as designs may be an entirely different story, but the T-splines bottles are more complex. Is it because T-splines users are more artistic than SolidWorks users who tend to be more practical? Is it because the T-splines tool enables possibilities that you couldn’t or wouldn’t want to do in SolidWorks? I’m sure that you could model each of these in SolidWorks, but the workflow to do it might not be as elegant as in T-splines.

All of these models were done in T-splines, given to me in Rhino format, and converted to SolidWorks (except #7 which wouldn’t come in using surfaces, so I backed it out as a 3DSmax file, and brought it into SW using ScanTo3D). Some of these had color and transparency that didn’t come over through the translation. I also showed edges so you could get an idea of what is involved in some of these models. They are listed in the order in which I received them from Matt S.

At the bottom of this post is a little poll so readers can vote. I’m going to judge this, but I still want to see what you all think. I’m judging based on the complexity/quality of the model.

I thought that this one looked like a canteen. There is no discernable flat bottom, but the orientation it is shown in is how it would natually lie. Nice model. Smooth, nicely angled spout, including a finished thread.

I showed a rendering of this model in a previous post. Nicely crazy shape and a handle that achieves grips without doing it explicitly. Modeling that twisted handle would be a challenge in SW, but it could be done. Blending it into the top and bottom would be the real challenge.

This one is the one I judged as the winner because it is the most developed idea and the model was the most detailed, and it looks like the most thought went into it. So #3 wins. #2 and #4 were my runners up, but there are things to learn from each of these models.

Really, I love this one. It’s a great idea, just lacking a thigh and a lampshade. If you can’t see what it is, it’s a woman’s leg in a high heel shoe. Very nicely done, unfortunately I was judging on criteria other than ideas that get the best reaction. Love it, though, Love it.

This is the standard Coke bottle. Nicely done. Maybe a little severe around the label waist.

I especially like the crimped effect on the cap of this model. The cap looks very realistic. Again, this is doable in SolidWorks, although it might take some trying to make the cap look that natural. Shapes like the crimps on the cap in SolidWorks always have this way of seeming less natural than you want them to be.

Ok, this one is a pine cone or a hand grenade. Probably a cut glass perfume bottle. I did something like this many years ago in SW, except I think that I took a less graceful approach at the top. This type of geometry is very difficult to visualize, and then even harder to create. I don’t have any reason to doubt it could be done in SolidWorks, but it would be very dependent on the technique chosen.

This one is more of a basic bottle, but once you get into it, it is probably less simple than it at first appears. 

This bottle came in with some errors around the spout, but has a good amount of detail. It looks like they maybe took the easy way out around the finger grips, but (you can’t see) the bottom has a nice detail on it.

So which one do you like the best?

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Thanks to Matt Sederberg for putting this competition together and for supplying prizes!

From T-Splines site

T-Splines is a technology that you are going to hear more about over the coming years. As I understand it, it is a technology that helps bridge the gap between NURBS and mesh modeling. And yes, that’s a big deal for some users who convert from CG file types a lot like Maya or 3DSmax, or even people who do a lot of laser scanning or STL type conversions. The mesh to NURBS conversion right now is pretty labor intensive, and I think T-Splines may become part of a more efficient solution. Right now, it is not a stand-alone solution, it is only integrated into Rhino and Maya. I’d love to see it work with SolidWorks.

Anyway, I am judging a bottle modeling challenge on the  T-Splines forum. The difference between this challenge and mine is that the CEO of T-splines (Matt Sederberg) is actually giving away somehting of value – a license of T-Splines. If you want to submit something, head over to the T-Splines forum and post some images and your *.3dm model. 

Show off what you know about the software. Show a cool enough technique or finished shape and maybe you’ll get a free license of software!

Bottles are a very common showcase for complex shapes. Plastic bottles, glass bottles, you name it. This challenge may be too ambitious, but I’m gonna see what you folks come up with. The quality of the work you have submitted in previous challenges is stunning. I’m not going to pin you down to a specific bottle, but I’ll let you choose what you want to attempt. The orange bottle on the left in the image above is an orange juice bottle from the grocery store, and is found in my surfacing book. The light blue one is something I did from one of Ed Eaton’s tutorials, and the glass bottle  is a Coke bottle. The green bottle is an old standard from the SolidWorks training manuals, and the red one on the left is something I bought at the grocery store and modeled by sight, and can be found in a surfacing class I did for SolidProfessor.

Well done bottles are enormously difficult, and will make you pull out all the tools and all the tricks. I suggest that you browse around the grocery store and take digital pictures of a bottle you’d like to model. These things are everywhere in your life, and the designs can be fantastic, some of them are fantastically difficult to model. Remember that this is a “modeling” challenge, not a “design” challenge, which is to say that this  about duplicating an existing shape as closely as you can, just from visual data. If you want to design your own bottle, that’s fine, but I’ll be commenting on the modeling, not critiquing design.

One thing I’d like to see is if you can cleanly execute a handle like the blue or red bottles. Handles like this are difficult because they flow into and out of the main shape of the rest of the bottle. 

I’ll be looking for a several things:

• is it a solid?
• does it have a thicker neck than body?
• how is the bottom domed?
• is there a thread on the neck?
• is the neck round?
• surface continuity
• can you figure the volume of the bottle?
• extra points for multithickness shell feature
• extra points for shell to outside

Make sure to check back here every couple of days. I will add submissions to the end of this post, just like all the other challenges. Where possible, you will be able to download the models by clicking on the images. To submit a model, just email it to matt at dezignstuff dot com. Make sure you submit stuff that can be posted publicly and that you have the rights to, or at least say where you got something if it is borrowed. If you use a software package other than SolidWorks to make your bottle, just show or tell the basic commands that you went through to make the part. 

Typically I post each part with an image, and make some comments on the modeling techniques used. I don’t grade the work or criticize, although I might make suggestions for improvement, mostly I point out the high points of models, and might pick out a model or two as exceptionally well done.

This is mainly an exercise to learn and have fun. So start modeling a bottle!

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Be careful of what you ask for, because you just might get it. Entry #1 is from Garrett Brooks. This is a Klein Bottle, where the inside and outside surfaces are one continuous face. You can’t make them from a single surface feature in SW because of problems with self intersecting geometry, but you can construct it in multiple surfaces. Have a look at how Garrett accomplished this, and then made it solid to boot!

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Entry #2 comes from Lin Shao Dun.  This is made with a single sweep. Lin turned this sweep 90 degrees and got some wild results. This is a great example of some of the control you can achieve with the sweep command. You need to download this one. just to see what he did and how he did it.

Sweeps don’t do domed bottoms very well when you sweep between top and bottom, but using this technique he could have easily.

Also, for anyone who’s curious, that finish on the bottle is the “rough draft” appearance. Lin is taunting me because I just put “rough draft appearance” low on my list of stuff I wanted to see in the software.

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Entry #3 is from none other than Mark Biasotti. There are many things to point out here. First, click on the image to download the zipped file from the SolidWorks server. It is large enough (~35 MB), so by the time you’re done reading here, it may be downloaded. Next, notice in the FeatureManager, that it starts out with a long list of reference sketches, including sketches with +s next to them. These are sketch pictures, which are a great form of visual reference. This part, according to Feature Statistics has 175 features. Don’t be afraid to make a lot of features. You don’t get bonus points in a real model for using fewer features. I think some times people leave out stuff because they think a better model has fewer features. To me a better model has the correct geometry, regardless of the number of features. 

If you roll back the part and roll it down feature by feature, you’ll also notice that Mark used a lot of reference surfaces. This is another great way to create design intent and get started on the model. 

There are two problem areas on this part, as I see it, well three, really. I’m sure I’m not saying anything that Mark has not already agonized over a bit. I use the “Tangent Edges as Phantom” display setting. this allows me to see very quickly which edges are tangent, and which are not. SolidWorks in the past used a tighter definition of “tangent”, so these days almost everything you intend to be tangent actually turns out tangent. But on this model, there are two areas around the handle that are not tangent.

Here’s the first area. See that Mark applied the tangent constraint, but the Fill surface didn’t make it very tangent. Deviation Analysis shows it is at most 1.45 deg off. It’s close, very close, but no cigar. Is it close enough? Depends on your manufacturing method, probably. In this case, it is probably good enough. You never want to count on mold polishing to get rid of modeling imperfections, but in this case, you might not notice an edge in the molded part. And even if you did, is it really that important? I can’t answer that question. The answer would be different in different situations.

The next questionable area is on the bottle across from the handle. This time it was a boundary surface with a Curvature constraint applied. This can happen sometimes when the Direction 2 curves are not C2 to the face that the Direction 1 edge is on – so you are essentially asking the software to make the new geometry C2 when the existing references do not meet that condition. Without looking at this in great depth, I’d say that’s the situation that we have here.

None of this is meant to criticize Mark, but I just want to show that even in the hands of a recognized master, the software still has limitations. I don’t want to take away from the quality of the work, but rather to use it as a learning tool so you can see some of the situations in which you may have to go extra steps to really get perfect data. I also wanted to show this because this is probably one of the most complete examples we are going to see. I’m taking this apart in detail because I want to learn stuff as well. I hope that no one goes through my models like this, because they are full of stuff that you shouldn’t do. If you want to see me take apart my own models, I do it a few times in the surfacing book. Analysis of results is really a great way to learn.

I would venture to guess that most folks aren’t going to put in 6 hours or more to make a model for this challenge. The more realistic your modeling task needs to be, the more detail you have to show, and the more correct it needs to be, the more real life errors you will run into. In looking at the feature properties, I see that the model was made about a year and a half ago, so some of the feature functionality may have changed in that time, which may be what is causing some of these issues. If the part were rebuilt today using SW2009, I would be willing to bet that the results would be somewhat different.

Some of the things Mark did here are very difficult. First the three corner blends. Around the top of the bottle there are 2 3 corner blends, shown here inside the red rectangles. They are both involving the label face. Spend some time looking at the model to see how Mark achieved these very difficult blends.

Bending the handle into the top area of the bottle is also a difficult task.

Here’s one that maybe Mark didn’t intend.

Many label faces need to take a paper label, and paper labels don’t stretch. With a paper label, you can only have curvature in one direction. This face has curvature in both directions, so it is probably intended for one of several types of non-paper labels that are available these days. I just point this out in case you are tasked with making a bottle that requires a paper label. Anyway, on a spline used for the label face, you can see a small section of the curvature comb goes below the spline. This means that the spline flips convexity, and that the resulting face has a dip in it. This may be too small to see on the real part, but the curvature comb doesn’t lie.

Mark skipped a few things like shelling the part, doming the base, the neck, the threads, etc, but it is a great example of the exterior features of the bottle, and bottles in general.

Thanks to Mark Biasotti for submitting a great learning example. And a rendering he sent a link to.

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Entry #4 is from Adrian Siu, his first entry in these challenges. This is what Adrian had to say about his model:

I didn’t have an actual bottle to model, I just had a picture of the new Tropicana jug, so I made something that had 1L volume and than scale everything and obtained an internal volume of 2.63L (89oz.).

 

I didn’t focus so much on design (the feature tree and approach are obviously not optimized and reflect the “pain” of trial and error) but I rather focused on the modeling challenge. Got the measurable volume, you have to roll back before the shelling operation, got the multithickness shell feature, got the shell to outside, got the threads on the neck. What I found really difficult to achieve by doing solid modeling was to get the label placement area, which I could not do… I’ll try more, maybe a surface design.

Entry #5 is from Michael McCune. This one is done as an assembly. I was expecting to see an inserted part somwhere to start the inner part, but he approached it differently with a lot of assembly layout information. Click the image to the left to download an 18 mb zip file (missing one part – the OJ! someone on my server drank it…)
Here is what he had to say about the model:

Here is my challenge bottle; it is a 3 Liter Tropicana Orange Juice bottle from the near future. Sorry I couldn’t include the part file for the Liquid OJ as it’s 100+ mb so I gave you a few pictures…the 1 and 2 Liter marks on the back are accurate btw…fun stuff. Uh, there is really no grand Industrial Design Thesis to this thing, I was just having fun. The shroud is injected and the inner bottle is blow molded and glued in place (OJ is very expensive in the future, allowing me an unlimited budget).

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Entry #6 is from Mike Dzieciuchowicz. Mike used some good tools in the course of making this bottle. The shape on the top half of the bottle was wrapped onto it. Nice touch. The ring around the middle was a separate body and then subtracted. He also got in the multithickness shell to make the neck thicker than the body and the shell to outside so you are modeling the fluid volume rather than the bottle. 

Mike also pulled off a thread, cleaned up extra faces with the Delete Face tool. His thread uses a variable pitch helix to avoid the common problem of “how do I end this thread?” That I think is the first time I’ve seen the variable pitch helix used that way. Thanks for the submission!

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Entry #7 is from Matt Lombard. This is a glass bottle I did for a project. The “thread” and neck were copied from a Snapple bottle. It was done with a wrap feature. The fruit is supposed to be a mango. Looks more egglantish to me. All of that was done with patterned thickened surfaces. The pattern on the bottom was just a sweep and a fillet. Chewed up cpu time, though. The text was the most difficult thing here. It was wrapped onto a similar surface, then extended and trimmed to fit the double curvature of the mango. This was an interesting project, although I’m not convinced I was the best person for this kind of work. 

The bottle has 136 features, about half of which are shown in the list. The Dome feature was used to dome the bottom. It was not shelled, but I used a cut revolve to make the inside smooth. In reality, the glass is molded using a blow-mold like process, and the inside takes on the shape of the tooling minus the glass thickness, with some natural smoothing of small detail. The text was what I was most apprehensive about. I was not sure that level of detail was achievable in the glass process, which I haven’t worked with enough to know stuff like that. Plus, the text on the bottom dome of the bottle might complicate opening the mold. I told the customer that they would have to deal with the mold maker on these issues.

I went around with the customer also on the text originally because she wanted a label, but also wanted the double curvature. I told her I could design anything she wanted, but the labels weren’t likely to work correctly.

The display here is just RealView with the Glass. Gloss, Blue Glass mater… er, appearance. I think it looks pretty cool.

The project was meant to put a bunch of people to work on a tropical island where they had a lot of wasted fruit, and no knowledge of preservation techniques. I hope it succeeded, although I have not heard back from the customer. I get a wide range of interesting projects like this that come in from time to time.

I can’t provide a download for this because it is customer’s data.

I’ve got to admit, I had a bit of difficulty getting a propeller that was even recognizable. This challenge may be more difficult than it looks. Consumer product, “artsy surfacing”, is easy enough, because no one knows if you are faking it. There is no such thing as “precision” in that kind of modeling. As long as it looks good, you’re ok. I’m not trying to put down that kind of work, because I do plenty of it. 

The difference with technical surfacing is that you’ve got to satisfy the asthetic sense, but only after you’ve satisfied the math. I didn’t really use any math for this model, but people who do make propellers and other air or fluid foil shapes do need to be technically precise. A recent boat hull project brought some of this to my attention. 

So, the challenge is to model a propeller. You can model a plane or boat propeller, or some other type, such as a pump or compressor impeller – any sort of turbomachinery type device will do. I’ll go through each model and make comments based on a few things:

• starting reference data if any
• quality of sketches
• inventiveness in SolidWorks surfacing techniques
• does it actually look like a propeller?
• surprise me

Anyway, my comments may not come immediately, this is a busy week for me. Send in your models to my email address, matt at dezignstuff dot com. I’m really looking forward to this. Technical surfacing is very difficult.

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Entry #1 is from Matt Sass. Matt swept an airfoil shape along a straight line, using the “Twist Along Path” option, twisting 60 degrees. Thanks for that entry! The first step is the most courageous. Click the image to download the part. Keep ‘em coming!

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Entry #2 is from Garrett Brooks. This is a very nice job. Garret searched the web and found a nice sketch picture, then traced the various profiles and used Derived Sketches to place the sections where they should go, then made a Boundary surface with several guide curves. The ends of the blades are capped off with Fill surfaces. This one is nicely done. You owe it to yourself to download it and check it out.

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Entry #3 is from Rick McWilliams. This is another very nicely done model. Rick made a boat propeller instead of a plane prop. Rick used a different technique on this one. Because the blades take up a bigger wrap angle around the prop, it made most sense to lay the lofts out using cylindrical cross sections instead of flat cross sections. The required flat sketches that were wrapped onto cylindrical faces. Then rick lofted through the wrapped edges, and lofted to a point to cap off the blade. Very nicely done. This one is saved in an older version of SolidWorks. Don’t know which one, but it is at least earlier than 2009.

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Entry #4 is also from Rick McWilliams. This is an assembly of a cooling fan.  Download Ricks assembly and parts and see how he made the blade. 

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Entry #5 is from Dave Yeagly. Dave took the simple but effective route with this one. He did a two line loft to get a twisted shape, then trimmed it to get the prop blade shape.

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Entry #6 is from Robert Veronneau of Hammerhead Aviation. Robert had a P-51 Mustang propeller blade sitting around the office, and decided to digitize it. It looks like he used DezignWorks with a romer arm. Robert says “The sketches (Splines) have not beed cleaned up yet, so the entire model is a bit rough.” Yeah, looks REALLY rough, Robert. Actually it looks great. Thanks for sending this model!

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Entry #7 came from Garrett Brooks. This is a nicely done surface model. Download the model and check it out.

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Entry #8 is from Mark Reader. Finished in Solidworks, but done in MoI. Here is what Mark had to say:

Wow, great challenge……  First off, I intended to do this model completely in SW but it became too frustrating and so it was back to MoI.  Not trying to be a fanboy or sell it, but it is a fun program to work with.  Like Garrett I spent time searching for some drawings but I like the one he found better.  My approach was similar to his but I found it difficult to get rid of the waves, dips & bulges I was getting.  You can see some in his model too if you look down from the tip of the prop.  They’re there, but not that bad compared to what I was getting.  

 

Attached are 2 props done in MoI, brought into SW and rendered.  1 is semi-realistic and the other just for fun.  The import into SW wasn’t as clean as it’s been for me before.  I got several “extra” surfaces so there was some clean-up needed.  I also didn’t pay much attention to size/scale.  If time allowed I wanted to work on the wing tips a bit more but…..

Entry #11 is from Chris Huntley. Chris made a turbine blade. Here is what Chris had to say about this model:

Another hack’n'slash attempt, somewhat late and maybe not what you were looking for…  

The attached is an eyeballed turbine blade, the airfoil modelled using a boundary surface. The section sketches are derived from a master.  What I didn’t know was that you could drag and scale a proportional spline in a derived sketch….   Haven’t explored this any further.

No idea how near realistic it is (not very at a guess).

The last time I attempted to model one of these was using SWX 98+ when I had to try to reconstruct a blade from a drawing (coord sections) to use as a scaled calibration target.  This was  for a set of tip clearance probes a former employer used to make.  It was completely impossible…

Keep up the good work,

I’m impressed by the level of work that was submitted for the handle challenge! You sent in some great models. Special thanks to everyone who took the time to make something and send it to me to submit it to scrutiny.

I have included commentary on each model in the original post. There was plenty to say about all of the work. Where available, I included the comments of the person who sent in the model, as well. It is always interesting to see what’s going through someone’s mind as they work with shapes like this.

Each model has its strengths. Aside from Charles Culp’s production model images, the above image was probably the most professionally done, by Michael McCune. I like the saddle horn type effect on the end of Chris Huntley’s shiny example. James Canney made what I thought was the most involved model (top of this page). Lin Shao Dun submitted the most different techniques, including things he thought didn’t work well. I firmly believe you learn more from mistakes than from success. Dan C showed that if you can manipulate surface UV flow, you can gain some interesting design features from that control. R. Paul Waddington showed that even AutoCAD has some capability in this arena. Costi showed that subtleties are important, and even a flashy feature like Freeform is capable of subtleties. Itai Lewin was the only one to demonstrate how the Flex feature can be used to add organic shape to a model.

Again, I’m very impressed with all of this work. Thanks to all who submitted something. And for you lurkers out there, why don’t you try your hand? It’s fun, and you might learn something. 

The next challenge will be coming in a week or so, and will be an airplane propeller.

The next surfacing challenge is a handle. If you want to participate, just make some sort of a handle, and send it to my email address (matt at dezignstuff dot com). This is a non-descript handle, the main traits I’d like you to aim for are:

• the rounded end, or really anything but a flat end.
• the finger grips
• experiment with freeform
• experiment with deform (actually, this is a nice way to make grips)
• remember you can loft to a point and assign tangency to the point to round off the end of a loft
• if you use some software other than SolidWorks, just tell us how you made it (screen shots of reference data or in-progress pictures would be great).

My part is in SW09 format, but you can use whatever you like. The part I made was a 3 minute part with only 2 sketches, not very carefully done, so I expect yours to be better than mine.

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Entry #1 is from Charles Culp in the form of images. Charles designs joysticks in the course of his day job at Essex Industries. These images are the property of Essex Industries, used here by permission. Here is what Charles has to say about these designs:

 

Here are three examples. The first two were designed in Solidworks. The third was designed in CATIA (by our customer), then imported, remodeled and modified in SolidWorks. These are all for commercial planes.

 

The first grip was modeled in SW, then 3D printed, then modified with tools (knives, sandpaper, etc), then re-scanned. This process was done twice, to optimize the shape for ergonomics. Each time the model was placed “on top” of the scanned model, and parameters were changed to match the scanned shape. Changes of .050″ can make a huge difference in how it feels.

 

Note that the second one has a “simulated trigger”. There is just a place for the index finger to grip, and separate from the other fingers. This creates one single scallop, which is beneficial when you have a requirement to fit a large variety of hand sizes. Adding scallops for every finger can be uncomfortable for really large or small hands.

 

Entry #2 is from Itai Lewin, and employs some interesting techniques. The first Extrude is to create a reference surface, and it is mirrored to allow opposite sides to be lofted together. Like the spoon earlier, Itai used a left, a right and a center loft profile. This is common, and the technique can be used for many different symmetrical shapes. Both sides were lofted. I assume the front and the back were lofted separately to minimize the influence of the wavy grip sketch.

Then the body was flexed to give it an interesting curvature (the Move/Copy feature was added by me so you could see the original and flexed bodies at the same time).

Nice job! Very interesting model.

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Entry #3 is from Lin Shao Dun. If you aren’t familiar with Lin, he is the one who walks away with the SolidWorks Beta contest every year for the last several years. 

In this model, he simply revolves a shape, then uses Deform to add shape to it. Beautiful. Nicely done. Deform is considered a “direct editing tool” because it can edit the shape of both native and imported geometry. To use the Deform, just draw a sketch that represents the shape you want an existing edge to have, then tell Deform to deform from this edge to that sketch. I think “curve to curve” deformation is the most useful option in the Deform tool. Nice example, and a very simple tree.

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Entry #4 is also from Lin Shao Dun. This shows the subtle difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. If you have a close look at this part, you can see that the sides of the handle are lumpy. Freeform does something called “teetertottering” (ok, I’m the only one who calls it that), but when you move one point down, Freeform moves another point on the opposite side of a fixed point up. Just like a teetertotter. Again, Freeform is another direct edit tool because it enables you to change the shape of existing geometry, native or imported. Notice that he caps off the rounded end with a Fill surface.

Another nice example. I commend Lin for sending in attempts that don’t necessarily represent perfection. We all learn more from failures than from successes.

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Entry #5 is again from Lin Shao Dun. In this one, Lin uses a loft instead of a boundary, and comes up with very similar results. 

One of the main differences between boundary and loft is that loft can make a closed loop where boundary can’t. Boundary can only make a closed loop if you have a closed loop as a direction 2 curve. In my example, I had to mirror the boundary. Lin doesn’t have to mirror his loft, although he did in this case.

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Entry #6 is from Lin Shao Dun. This submission uses a sweep. A sweep can potentially get you into trouble on a part like this, but Lin avoids the trouble nicely. The path in this case is the sketch on the side of the handle. When you use a curved path, you need to at least consider the “keep normal constant” option. In this case, Lin used that option, and it keeps the profile facing in the same direction instead of following the path around the curve. 

Another potential problem with a sweep is that you get lulled into using a circle or an ellipse for the profile. An ellipse as profile would either fail or allow the finger indentations to cause undulations on the far side of the handle. Lin got around this by using a spline. Definitely my recommendation. He even got the spline handle relations correct so that the mirrored sweep shows tangent to the original surface. Again, very nicely done.

The last problem you can run into with a sweep that ends at a point is that the point can be messy. That in fact happens in this case. Lin dealt with it correctly, and cut it off with a trim, then patched it with a fill, using an existing curve as a constraint curve. The only problem here is that the mirrored fill does not show as tangent to the original (remember to use the “View, Display, Tangent Edges As Phantom” setting to tell immediately if surfaces that meet at an edge are tangent or not). To get around this, he might have created the Fill after the mirror, and used a different constraint curve.

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Entry #7 is from Dan C. Dan made a loft and his finger grips were more precisely planned than mine. He also capped off the end of the handle with a loft that used tangency weighting to get the rounded shape. Tangency weighting is often overlooked in splines and lofts. 

Nicely done, and thanks for the submission!

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Entry #8 is from Chris Huntley. This is one of the techniques I was hoping to see. Chris started off with a boundary for the basic shape, then split out a section and used Deform to reshape the finger grips. This avoids the finger grips from influencing the rest of the handle shape. 

Also, nice shape on the end of the handle created with a boundary to a point from an edge. Very cool model.

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Entry #9 is also from Chris Huntley. This one uses Freeform instead of Deform. 

This is what Chris had to say when commenting about the differences between the two features:

two variants of a rather unexciting handle attached (SW2009).  The first, after a bit of fiddling, uses a deform-to-curve to create the ‘finger’ grips.  The second uses a freeform feature.  My modelling is a bit cut-and-shut.

I’ve not really used these tools before but both seem to be relatively easy methods of creating the grip form, if not offering the finest control – freeform seems to like adding wrinkles and with deform the result seems to be at the mercy of the controls.  I probably need more practice tho.

You’re definitely at the mercy of the tools. “Cut-and-shut” must be the Brittish equivalent of “hack and whack” or something along those lines. This is just an online modeling challenge. No one is going to criticize you for not getting outrageously detailed here. Showing cool techniques is what it’s all about. 

Nice model, and thanks for showing your stuff!

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Entry #9 is from Michael McCune. Michael just sent images, no model, but you can clearly see what he did from the images. The finger grip sketch uses dimensionable arcs, and allows for a more controlled shape. Click on the images for a larger version. Notice the straight section at the base of the grip, still created with the loft or boundary.

This is a nicely done model with great shape and control. Black is a very difficult color to render properly. Michael achieves it here with the use of a bit of texture to reflect the light smoothly.

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Entry #10 is again from Dan C. This time he split up the sketch along the side to control the angle of the finger grips somewhat. This is a nice idea and a good way to control the model. I’d like to point out, though, that there is an easier way to do this, although it may not offer as precise control. Sketch2 could have been one continuous shape if the loft had made use of connectors to direct the flow of the surface from the grips. Where Dan’s first model was fairly straight, notice this one slants inward. This can be controlled by loft connectors.

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Entry #11 is from Costi. This model uses the Freeform feature twice. Once was for the finger grip and a second time for the gentle arc on top of the grip. The two faces are separated by the split line. Nicely done. Notice, though that with the Freeform feature, you are less in control of the shape than you might hope. You still get that very characteristic spline-like shape. This is something I am just noticing now, comparing the various models made from different methods.

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Entry #12 is from R. Paul Waddington, the AutoCAD reseller from Australia. The model comes in the form of images only, no solid part file. This is what RPW has to say about modeling the handle:

Using AutoCAD, tho’ this time 2009, have chosen to model a saucepan handle.

Image 01 shows the five profiles used, the two end ones being lofted along the upper an lower splines and the other profile used to form the concave end. Did exaggerate the lower spline, somewhat, to force the ‘finger’ locations to be both convex and concave closer to the pan end of the handle.

The embellishments, button (with molded insert), hanging ring, ferrule (with dovetail joint) and hole/counterbore for screw and button, were done just to make it a complete exercise.

Once I started your handle challenge I realized it might be a good training exercise for those I teach AutoCAD modelling too and having completed it I will use it for that purpose.

Additionally I would like to dedicate this model to an Autodesk employee, a Mr. Andrew Anagnost.  Andrew has always had a great vision for Autodesk’s mechanical modelling so I am sure he will be ‘tickled pink’ to see this done in AutoCAD.

I look forward to see what other have done and thanks again Matt for setting another challenge.

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Entry #13 is from James Canney. This model has several discussion points. It is a little more complex than the other models.

The shape starts off with a loft using 3 U shaped splines as profiles, and 2 U shaped splines as guides. Download the file and check it out. The only criticism I would offer here is that the loft cannot control curvature across the guide curves, so on this part you get a bit more of a ridge along the plane of symmetry than you might want. For this reason, I would have used a Boundary surface, and set the 2 guides as Direction 2 curves and set them normal to profile. This would have avoided the appearance of a ridge.

From there James trimmed the loft to shape and mirrored it. Notice that he uses a mirror here and then another mirror at the bottom of the tree. This is a trap that is easy to fall into on complex parts. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you wind up redoing the same work over again, especially in a history based system where it remembers what you do. In this case, I would leave out the first mirror, and model the thing all the way to the bottom in half.

Next is a Freeform feature to shape the grip. Nicely done.

The inset for the grip area is the most interesting feature here, to me. The way he achieved this was to offset the surface, then extrude a surface at the boundary of the inset, and perform a trim cutting away the grip part of the larger surface and the outside of the smaller surface, leaving a small step for the extruded surface. Don’t sell Trim short. It is sometimes a difficult feature to deal with, especially when more than 2 surfaces are involved and when you can’t see either the section to keep or section to remove. In this case, you have to look inside the open end of the handle to be able to select the right pieces. 

James used a Boundary to cap off the end of the handle. I would use a Fill simply because of the degeneracy, but Boundary seems to work.

Models that are more involved tend to open themselves up to more commentary. This is a well done model, with a very nice finished shape. Thanks for this late entry!

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Entry #14 comes from Mark Reader. I’m always interested in what other CAD packages can do, especially the affordable ones, like Moment Of Inspiration (MoI).  Mark used 2 sweep features to create this, and it comes into SolidWorks beautifully. MoI uses the Rhino file type (*.3dm). I particularly like the way the bulged section and the step on the top half blend into a smooth face on the bottom half.