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.
I was listening to Mark Biasotti’s SWW10 presentation on Surfacing 301. Honestly, I have never heard more useful information given out to users anywhere. If you do surfacing, everything he said was right on the mark, and great stuff to know. I took notes while listening and picked up a half a dozen tasty morsels. Thanks Mark. Great stuff. Some of it is just factual information about how the software works, but it helps you make better modeling decisions. That’s what it all comes down to for many of us.
How familiar does this sound?
Since the software runs on servers managed by
[xxx], there is no need to invest in expensive computer hardware. In
addition, if a designer is visiting a supplier, he or she can log on to the
service from any available computer. No need to have the design software
locally loaded. Within a few years, you might be able to work on designs
from your seat on an airplane.
SolidWorks job openings
SolidWorks tweeted about job openings today, so I thought I’d go and have a look at what kind of folks they are hiring during this recession. Plus, I figure this blog is as good a place as any to try to recruit a Product Manager for Cloud Computing. Many of us have already offered some free guidance in this area. Qualifications: Drink This Kool-Aid.
Yesterday I did something stupid. I have two projects going, one in 2009 and one in 2010. I was working on the 2010 parts when the 2009 customer called, and I opened his file… in 2010… and saved it. It has about 80 features, many of those requiring more than one sketch, and most of the sketches are splines. You cannot copy sketches from one version to another, and let me tell you recreating splines without the ability to copy is not fun at all. The file was too new to have a backup on my system. Rebuild, and it will take about 4 hours.
Here was a little surprise. A Chinese version of the SW2007 Bible. The biggest surprise was that it was actually from my publisher, and not a bootleg. I mean the only thing I usually get from China is spam. It’s about half the size of the English version. I’ve got 4 of these things. I’ve thought of giving them out at user group meetings, or sending them to perfect strangers.
If I asked you to ‘point to a PLM’, what would you do?
PLM of course stands for product lifecycle management. It has taken me a while to put together what I think it actually means, but in my experience the phrase is used to refer to a suite of integrated software encompassing disciplines traditionally covering the entire lifecycle of a product, from concept through accounting, including CAD, FEA, CFD, PDM, ERP, MRP, EDM, CNC, ETC…. I look at it as more a philosophy than an actual product, a philosophy where all of your product related data authoring and management software is somehow integrated into a single workflow process. Selling the philosophy is usually the realm of the Really Big CAD companies, like Dassault (Catia) and Siemens PLM (Unigraphics/NX). It is in part the crowning jewel of consolidation of the engineering software and product development industry. The big get bigger.
Warning: this blog post is a bit all over the place. Everything seems related in my head, or at least it did when I first wrote it. 1/3 history lesson, 2/3 future lesson. Trace relevance to CAD. Lamenting the rule of corporations. A bit of a crazy rant thrown in for good measure.
Read more on Dr. Evil or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud…
Disallowing bug fixes for non-subscription customers is reprehensible, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.
In a post entitled “Autodesk Subscription – it could be worse“, Steve Johnson of the AutoCAD blog Blog Nauseum recently took note of the flap of disgruntled SolidWorks users. By any account, SolidWorks is making a graceless transition to integration with the corporate juggernaut Dassault.
Read more on Autodesk users take notice of Solidworks bad customer relations…
Devon Sowell has been writing a blog for longer than I have been, and one of his favorite topics is why do we need service packs? Devon believes, along with a lot of other people that the software should be good to go when it is delivered to customers. Forcing customers to pay for service packs (bug fixes) is preposterous, and yet maintenance is supposed to be partially for bug fixes, and partially for reseller support, which many users find to be completely useless.
Read more on Rich Welch talks about subscription on Devon’s blog…
A: when it is a sales tool.
B: when it is a cudgel.
C: when they are telling you what you want.
D: all of the above.
http://www.surveygarden.com/SolidWorks/SWsurvey.php
Sigh. So it begins. SW is trying to figure out how much to charge you for cad in the cloud. They are asking the questions in ways that seem obvious what they expect you to answer. I don’t know what they expect to gain from this. I think it is just a shot across customer’s bow rather than a survey. Any chance our favorite VP Mr. Welch is involved?
Mark Biasotti asked an interesting question over on the SW forums,
how can we make SW better at reusing or carrying forward concept and prototype work to the final design.
This is another bit of advice you can give SW here if you haven’t already done so on the SW forum. Chime in in the comments and let your voice be heard.
Read more on Concept to Production: Edit, Reuse or Rebuild?…
So. This is a bit of a walk-through talking about how I modeled the Batmobile. Is it more entertaining than a $70 video tutorial of how to model an Audi R8? No idea. I do know it’s about $70 cheaper, though.
I have had another surprising problem with 2010. One of the changes that I originally applauded was the ability to change the tolerance on the Knit feature. This seemed like a good thing because it allows you to get Knits to work that would otherwise simply fail for no reason you could see. SW2010 frequently gives the error “There are no edges to knit. Please loosen the knitting tolerance according to the gaps.” Ok, I’m happy that we have the control now to set the tolerance, but unhappy that we need to set the tolerance more frequently without any sort of an explanation of why. I just bump the tolerance to 0.001″ and it seems to work every time it is going to work. I haven’t experimented enough to know if that is causing additional problems down the road. By the way, whenever I get this error, it is usually confusing because it doesn’t list any edges in the range of gap sizes shown by default.
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