Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

Wow. I’ve met some great user group leaders, like Dan Podmizek, Gerald Davis or Ricky Jordan, but now I’ve got to add Randall Bock to that list of overachievers. Randall works at Penn State University, and is a relatively recent convert to SolidWorks from AutoCAD. He started this new user group to bring together his students and the area industry.

The first meeting had a presentation from the inventor of an artificial heart. I was very honored to be the presenter at his second meeting. Randall had a posse of students helping him with various titles such as the “Manager of Impossible Situations”, or the “Master of Disaster”. I should have had pictures of these guys. They helped Randall pull it all off, getting the food, helping set up the AV, checking attendees in, giving out name tags, giving out door prizes.

If there weren’t 100 people, we were at least close to that number. He got a great mix of students and industry to attend, which is a feat.

I met several people that I knew in one way or another, the prolific professor JD Mather, Kyle Mason from Twitter, Charlie of the mad hatter fame, and a few others I had known from training in my reseller days or other events. Joe Galiera (aka “Flow” Joe) is a SolidWorks simulation tech rep. I never met Joe before, but we had a good conversation about a lot of things. He’s a really personable guy and down to earth. If you have any needs in that direction, look him up. I hope to run into Joe at other events like this. Maybe in Orlando at SolidWorks World.

Ok, we were NOT posing for this. At least we were trying hard not to pose. Notice that I did not wear my customary painter shorts and Keen sandals.

I got a special parking place in the machine shop right behind the huge New Holland tractor. Randall works in the Agricultural Engineering department. In the image above you see the pallet of stuff ready to go over to the show. With the drink coolers, we had 2 pallets to take over. The fork lift was handy in getting it all over there easily.

My presentation was on surfacing, and I had a lot of software problems. I had to bring my new XI box, because my little laptop can’t do RealView. At home I use two monitors, but here I could only use one. I also use a detached PropertyManager. On a single monitor, the detached PropMgr was off the screen and could not be retrieved. I torched the SolidWorks registry to reset the interface to defaults. Of course this happened live.

Next I had problems switching back and forth between SolidWorks and Powerpoint 2007. SolidWorks would just never show up. Not sure what was going on here, but I had to restart SW several times due to this intermittent problem.

Then I was walking through parts with my rollback bar. I saw all sorts of strange stuff. First the features under the rollback bar were not gray, they were regular color, but they didn’t show up in the graphics area either. The next problem was that the rollback bar at one point disappeared altogether. Then while I was editing a sketch, I could still see the feature (and instant3D was off). There’s another problem where you can’t get to the splitter to split the FeatureManager if you use the CommandManager. Geez, guys, this is SLOPPY stuff.

Anyway, this doesn’t even address any of the difficulties in actually modeling the parts, this is just keeping the software running and getting the interface to behave. For reference, I was using Vista 64, SW09 sp0, with Office 2007. I know, bad ideas all the way around.

More than surfacing, what I had to show was how to deal with quirky software under pressure.

The crowd asked a lot of questions. Some really good questions. When they asked about my underdefined sketches, I remembered that I was not in a surfacing type crowd. I showed how you could fully define stuff if you wanted to, but it didn’t make any sense with splines. People are very concerned with how to be precise when working with splines. How do you make parts fit together? That sounds like another blog post to me… The surfacing and appearance/rendering tutorials for the Model A will also become blog posts on their own.

The main ideas I wanted to convey at this user group meeting were:

• If you’re going to do “real” complex shapes, you’ve got to get comfortable with splines – lines and arcs with fillets do not do the same thing
• The primary surface creation tools each have situations where they are best applied (boundary, loft, fill, sweep)
• You have to understand what’s going on behind the scenes a little bit – stuff like nurbs, degeneracies, curvature concerns and the b-rep concept really help out a lot
• Most surfacing in SolidWorks is really troubleshooting, and knowing multiple methods to accomplish the same thing
• SolidWorks is not the best tool for this kind of thing, but you do sometimes need to use it for this purpose, and it does work.