Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

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!