SOLIDWORKS Tutorial - Surfacing for SolidModeling

[Music] alright guys so we're gonna jump into surfacing for solid modelers so the entire point of this webinar is to be an introduction and kind of demystifying some of the surface features time and time again as we talk to engineers and customers and contacts the topic that comes up constantly is wanting to know more about surfacing and so the goal of today is to introduce some of these basic concepts into how to achieve more of what we consider hybrid modeling right this is going to be true surface modeling but it is going to be how to use surface tools to augment your current toolbox of solid features that you're probably comfortable with day in and day out inside of SolidWorks the idea here being why servicing so surfacing allows you to start with some very simple shapes right this this head shape and then you know constructing a helmet and constructing something that is very complicated or would be very very complicated to make using surface or solid geometry and surfacing make something like this football helmet possible right none of these things are flat even faces that I'm going to click on and sketch on to create this geometry right I have to use a different set of tools this is some of the pieces we're going to get into today so as we go through this I'm going to start introducing some commands how those commands work and then as we get a little further in into the presentation we'll jump into SolidWorks and actually start using some of these to show you what this looks like and not just in a presentation sort of way so the first thing I want to talk to you is probably a command that I think is highly underutilized and that is delete face is again on the surfacing toolbar and delete face has a lot more capability than I think a lot of people realize especially when we're using imported geometry right so I have this this design here and I'm gonna choose delete face I'm going to select say for example these inside faces of these screws right if I got this model from someone in a different CAD package this might be just an imported body right and I need to remove these screw holes delete face is a great way to do that I can choose to leave these faces in patch and I will end up with a model without holes I can delete I can select all of these radiused edges and choose to delete them and I will end up with just a square that is the external faces I can again select all those external faces including the ones I can't see right now from this angle and I will end up with just this plate so I can use delete face to really remove and patch a lot of things in a very automated way let me hop into SolidWorks and do one of those right now so let's do sorry as I'm doing this I want to make sure you guys there we go you recognize that same kind of scenario right I have an imported body and I want to get rid of some of this this information here right so under surfaces I can choose delete face and I can select these faces a trick is there's a lot of selection filters inside the SolidWorks I'm gonna just right click and or not right click left click and it's gonna bring up my selection filters you can pick adjoining faces coplanar or both right since these are lined up all six of those faces get selected nicely it's not always perfect but it definitely helps if you know that toolbar is there and is going to pop up for you and then we can get rid of that face and you'll see it patches it nicely on this complex inner surface same for if I wanted to remove this star right same idea I'm gonna delete face in this case I'm gonna right click and say select tangency since they're all tangent and again delete and patch right very little effort to get rid of some pretty complicated pieces and if I wanted to use surface features to do that sure I could but it would be quite a bit more overhead than just using this simple command so now let's talk about some other real-world scenarios that this stuff might be really valuable so I'm going to talk about the idea of how to extend a surface and in turn I'm going to talk about creating a surface from geometry so we have this situation right I'm using maybe the whole wizard and I've selected a point and I need the hole cut and if the model slopes away we end up with a scenario kind of like this right where I can't the the tool has not removed all of the model material that I need gone and so I'm gonna have to you know manually remove that so we're gonna do is copy this surface using the offset surface command in a special configuration called copy surface we're going to extend that surface making essentially a cutting tool and then I'm going to use the tool called cut with surface to cut that out of the geometry another great use case of surfacing is as tooling basically tooling in your model so I can use it as a cutting surface or splitting you know I can affect change I jump back into SolidWorks I'm going to go through that process with a different model so let's grab the first one which is that same scenario and then I'll also grab the second one which is it's been a minute since I've pulled these up there we go extended countersink right so I want to start on the first one which is this one all right same scenario whole wizard puts a hole in at an angle and it doesn't get all of this in this scenario I'm actually going to use delete face I'm just gonna select that back surface using select other and say ok you'll notice it corrected that issue right for me now if I go to my next model that model that we saw in the presentation and I'm try and do that I will have kind of a failure and the failure is this surface is a little bit more complex it also interacts and intersects other surfaces in the model so it's not just I'm editing one surface I'm editing multiple surfaces so that original workflow won't work as well in this scenario what we're gonna have to do is copy the surface and create a cutting tool essentially so I'm going to use offset surface it allows you to pick any face or you know groups of faces and to offset that some amount right so we could go to millimeters and create a two millimeter offset from that that face if you set this to zero however you'll notice the tool changes to copy surface so it's basically just going to slap down a surface body where the face of our model was I'm gonna say okay now if I press tab to hide my model I can see my new surface body here this is what I want to use to cut so the tool we're gonna use is to extend that surface and we can choose these faces I'm gonna grab a couple extra just to make sure we intersect the whole model right they don't need to go nearly that high but it doesn't really matter and I'm gonna go shift tab to bring my model back and you'll see that this cutting tool kind of bisects that entire area I want to remove from this point we can use cut with surface pick our cutting utility in this case it's going to be this surface and then that arrow is where we want to remove so I want to remove the inside and I'm gonna say okay and you'll see we removed that entire section of the model again the this kind of workflow works great for this example you could very much use for example if we're doing something in a model and we extrude a surface to cut through another model we could very much extrude a surface through a model and then just use the cut with surface to slice the model along that surface this is a great example of how to use that but this is very much not the only use case of this type of a workflow so jumping back over let's talk about knit so knitting is the ability to do kind of what I did with offset surface there's two ways to do it or technically it became copy surface so in this scenario you'll see I have this effectively a pyramid and you'll notice that a sketch entity just appeared at the bottom a circle so basically I want that to come up through the top and I want to take whatever that bisects and move it up essentially so you'll see what I mean here in a second instead of it being a cylinder I want it to still maintain the original profile of the top of the cylinder so I'm going to use the Nick command to make a surface and then what I can do is when I do that extrude I can say offset from surface so I'm going to show you how to do this and then I'm going to show you how to do the offset which I think a lot of people also find very valuable so jumping back over which one is it this is going to be offset for multiple surfaces there we go and let's make that a view that's a little nicer to look at perfect so from that scenario I'm gonna just show this circle there so I'm magic on what I was talking about on the other slide I can use knit with surface to do similar to what I did with offset surface and I copied this surface basically if I choose knit surface and I select faces on my model I can knit those into a single surface I'm going to cheat and select tangency to select all of these when I try and select them by hand I almost always miss one I'm gonna say okay now again I've created a separate surface that is just all of those faces combined when you do this you'll notice a surface bodies folder appears if you don't already have that shown that lists those surface bodies and again that's that face that group of faces that I've just knitted together into a surface body so what I'm going to do is select my sketch and I'm going to say extrude now what I can do is say offset from surface and I can pick a surface and in this case flip the offset reverse offset and say you know 15 and construct that that didn't quite work like I wanted it to let me go back and remove that real fast let's here it is real fast so I can do kind of the same thing I did in the presentation now what I find to be more valuable and a lot of people kind of asked about is the opposite situation right I have this big body and I want to shell it but I don't want to shell the whole thing right so for example if I choose shell and I pick this body and I say yeah I want it all to be three millimeters right that's great i shelled the whole thing to three millimeters but what if I don't want to shell the whole thing to three millimeters what if I want to basically take this circle down and I want it to be three millimeters offset everything right so how do I drill this down but still leave three millimeters at the bottom I can do that same thing here so what I can do is take all of this and I can do my cut and when I do my cut I can say again instead of up to offset from surface say three millimeters and pick that surface now what's going to happen is you'll see that that preview is it's going to cut away all the material up to that offset from surface so what we've achieved is that same shell type of an operation but just in a limited scope so I can leave the rest of this very thick but I can cut out the area of interest and shell out this part of the model to appropriately I don't achieve what I'm trying to to facilitate here now the key takeaways from this is that when I want to make a surface body let's get rid of the surface body itself from existing geometry I can choose to either use knit surface and then select the appropriate surfaces of interests right and this will create a new surface body that is just those surfaces and then I can work with these surfaces independently or I can do the same thing by using offset surface and setting this to be copy surface I can do a very similar workflow same thing I have a new surface that is these faces and I can work with all of these faces now entirely independently without having to worry about interacting with the model so this allows me to modify individual faces separate from the model and then I could maybe potentially delete the original face on the model and replace it with the one I've modified so replace face all right this is a simple one but definitely a goodie for trying to do some of these very extreme shapes so in this situation I have a bowl but the upper rim is flat I don't want it to be flat I need to add some contour to it for what I'm looking for so from the side basically what I want is I want the bowl to exist and I want the bowl to come up to this surface so I wanted to follow this 3d surface and that's what I want this basically this edge of the bowl to follow I hope that makes sense to everyone and from there so basically what I've started with is the solid geometry and I've just inserted this surface in this case this would be something that would consider a tooling surface right a surface to do work what I'm going to use with this surface is what's called replace and it's replace face and so what we'll do Israel will replace that lower face with this new surface then of course we get rid of the surface and we've created this kind of complex geometry this works also twofold right I used it in this case to achieve a very complicated 3d shape but I can also use it on something like this right so I have this helix gear and this helix gear is only about half as long as I need it to be right I could put a face out in space and say actually replace face and replace the original face with my new surface again this is say like a perf like a normally spiraled helix and a high end CAD package and we could use that to extend the geometry so let's look at replace face I think I have this guy right here and I should even have a surface already added here so all right so again any time we're trying to we can look at some of these tools on SAR our surfacing toolbar and I'll notice out here does replace face if you hover over these boxes it will give you a little bit of a tooltip letting you know what we're doing you know target face to replace and then face replacement faces so in this case I will select the original face for that and I will select the replacement face all right and from there we'll just say ok and we'll achieve that replaced look right so now I've created a very complex contour for this edge of this part now it's kept the continuity or the and the areas that it's extended it's actually extended the surface itself maintaining the contour so other ways to achieve this and say like solid modeling would be pretty challenging right I would have to make this oversized the original parts I would then have to create a cutting sketch and cut out solid geometry it's just a little bit more challenging and less elegant a little clunkier if you will so replace face is a great tool for doing this type of replacement and also that helix gear I'm just something that most people wouldn't think of when I had to think about you know extending that helix gear most people are gonna copy the model you know trying to rotate it so it's the right angle you know merge them together cut the end off it's much more challenging endeavor as opposed to just replacing the end with a new face and letting the surface things tools you know rebuild that helix so intersect this is one that I don't think gets talked about enough intersect is a great tool for a lot of things basically intersect is the ability for me to pick surfaces solid bodies and planes and basically try and identify the regions between them that are in intersect essentially intersecting so in this case I have a bottle and I would like to know the internal volume of this complex volume so I'm gonna do is start by adding a surface or a plane through where I want the upper edge of my fluid to be and from there I can use the intersect tool now intersect tool is going to identify the internal volume that is created by these two surfaces intersecting and allow me to create that internal body that represents the fluid in my bottle and this is also parametric right I could change the height and I could change how much fluids in it so to walk you through that one since the first time I had seen this I didn't think it was gonna be I thought it was pretty cool but you know not something I would see that often and a lot of times this is the one that people are most excited about so I've learned to just this is something we should probably talk about so I've just created a plane I did that by control dragging a base reference frame if you want to ever create a plane that's just copied off another plane you can just press down control and then drag your surface up we'll say it goes up to eight inches that's right so this is where we're gonna fill the bottle up - same idea we're gonna use intersect now if you look up there I don't quite see it so what we're gonna use is the search functionality here so what I do is I can come in and I can choose commands I've already chosen commands it has a little command icon and I can start typing tools now once I find a tool I can click on the creepy eyeball and it will find the tool for me on the command bar I don't know where it's at it'll tell me or if I'm going to use this a lot I can click and drag and drop it onto you know my actual toolbar so in this case I'm going to pick my plane I'm going to click pick that' the body in this case I'm going to create internal regions and I'm going to say intersect and it's identified this internal volume that is created by this intersection when I say ok I can hide this and if I had my bottle we found this is the internal volume now if I wanted to assign mass properties to this volume that represents my fluid I could know how much this product weighs if I want to just look at the mass properties in evaluate I could get my volume right so if I come in here I can select say this body and I can get its volume right this is a forty point four to four cubic inch of fluid in my you know different my bottle essentially she metal and more importantly imported sheet metal for this case so in this case I have a part that was imported from potentially another cat tool and more than likely I would consider probably imported from like a lesser known CAD tool any cat is the term I use for that not a not a main one like inventor creo CATIA you know something that's lesser-known maybe doesn't have full sheet metal parametric abilities now when I imported into SolidWorks the first thing I want to try and do is convert it to sheet metal and in this case that's gonna fail and it's gonna fail because these aren't perfect bends now how do I get this into a real sheet metal part though right that's the big deal is I need this to be sheet metal and I suddenly can't interact with it so what I'm gonna do is start by copying the surfaces these are and she metal the important stuff is the flat stuff right so first thing I want to copy these surface has out I'm going to extend them so just extending these surfaces out over the ends then I'm going to use face fill its we'll talk about face fill it's to create the original radius and then we'll talk about convert sheet metal which is actually a surfacing tool a little known fact so I'm gonna come in here and create my sheet metal perfect now this is an imported body and if I try to run convert to sheet metal it will fail and it'll fail because this isn't a perfect radius right it's close but it's not perfect and so what I need to do is create this same body but I need to fix those arcs essentially so we're gonna come over to surfaces I'm going to use my offset or copy surface you'll notice that is probably one of the things I use most frequently and I'm gonna pick the bodies of interest say okay and I now have four surface bodies in this case I've taken kind of everything that I find really important with the original so I'm gonna hide the original and I have my four surface bodies in space in this case I'm going to start extending some surfaces all right so miss to pick this one pick OOP I don't want the whole surface I just want the edges I want this one I missed one let's try that again let's try this one more time I'm trying to get quick with the keyboard and it's not working there we go cool click this edge and I want it to go through the other part I want to create that intersection say okay same thing over here all I'm doing is creating those intersections so what this is generally referred to is repairing the model using surfacing if you've ever done mold making this is very common so now what I've done is I've created those faces now I've done this before so I know the radius this is supposed to be at so what I'm going to do is actually just artificially put in the fill it's when people pick fill it they always pick fill it they pick edges and we go to town now this is only one of four different fill it types that exist in the software and in the case we're dealing with right now I'm going to actually choose face Phil it's a face Phil it allows me to pick two faces define some radius and it will fill it anything kind of between them you'll notice in this case it's throwing to fill it on the wrong side I can flip the arrows to adjust it oh it's not quite 0.25 mm Wright's point - there we go it was grabbing the other part of it over here so with that I can say okay and I've created that fill it now I'm going to do this same thing to the other two sides I'm gonna pick the two faces and in this example it always places them on the wrong side so I'm just gonna correct that and say okay so face fill it which is the third option pick my new faces or my two faces and then flip them around all right now we're on the right side you'll notice as part of the fill a top eration it also trims the excess that is part of the value in using face fill it for this example I didn't have to trim the faces first it will trim them as part of the operation lastly I need this to be sheet metal again how do I do that so convert to sheet metal is actually a surfacing tool this is probably one of my favorite tools in the set is it allows us to do some pretty awesome functionality all right I'm gonna say it's a tenth now the first thing you're just select is the base and in case it's that and I'm gonna just pick the bend edges in this case I was expecting that that little met pop up what it's saying is it can't change the radius of bends that are already made right I'm selecting bends which is fine because there you'll notice that it updated this to the radius that I've selected now I hit OK it will create my sheet metal part with all of its complexity and off angle bends so now I can take what was a part that wasn't terribly useful right I can't flatten this sheet metal part you know it isn't truly a sheet metal part and I've converted it converted it into a part that I can flatten I can manufacture and I can easily reproduce again I'm showing you how to do just some really important stuff this is an example obviously but for example if I imported a model and say the fill it in just a normal model is bad and I'm missing that face and say an imported step file I could do the same type of operation I could copy these surfaces out I could make those surfaces I could delete the original faces and then I can technically use knit to knit a bunch of surfaces back together same type of idea I want to use surfacing tools to augment my solid modeling practices right I want to extend my tool kit of different you know capabilities I have in the software so we've created our flattened Abul sheet metal part now this is an example of over molding and using the thickening tools so here is a generic controller I'm sure you all recognize it I want to take this and create say an over molded rubber grip right here so what I'm going to start with is just a spline I've messed up the image I should fix that from there I'm going to use a tool called split line split line allows me to split faces of models based on maybe a projection of a sketch now I've created this surface or this face excuse me this is a face I'm going to use copy surface or NIT to create a surface from that face from there I'm going to use thicken cut which basically just perpendicular to a surface cuts away model so the King cut allows me to cut in and maintain that 90 degree all the way around from there I'm going to again copy that inside surface and I'm going to do a thicken which just creates model material I'm going to uncheck merge and then I will have two separate bodies one representing my plastic part to be injection molded and one representing my over molding that I would need to I could use for say same as the the bottle I could use this to understand exactly how much rubber is going to go into this and what my addition is in the second process that over a molding process so let's jump in and talk about this one real quick because these are a bunch of different tools we haven't talked about so far so I'm going to do you really think I could even maybe named these a little better one should just be named controller they can cut okay it's I did name them pretty well I'm just not reading them very well so perfect so I have my model and I'm gonna start by creating that line essentially that's spline that I want to cut with so I'm just gonna click on my right plane and start a sketch just go normal to that and I'm going to pick a style spline I'm going to say I want to go here there there there and there OOP I messed something up so we will actually let's just start over I had missed clicked somewhere let's try it one more time so there there what is going on with all right we're gonna do normal spline let's just do this let's grab that I'm unsure what I'm clicking on I'm aware so it works let's try just normal spline and we'll worry about that one later my inability to use splines is not the point of the presentation so I now have a spline that represents my overmolding I would like to use a style spline in reality because I can use that to make sure it's properly 90 degrees to the surface I'm leaving but this will still work just fine so with that I'm going to exit the sketch and the tool I'm going to use is actually found in features under curves and it is called split line again allows me to use a sketch and some faces in this case these two faces and project that sketch and cut up those two faces well in this respect and now I have basically where I want my overmolding to lie so I'm going to use that same workflow of I'm going to create click on the faces and inside surfaces I'm going to use copy surface now I have this original surface and I can use the thicken tools and in this case they can cut and this if I remember right is remarkably thin and you will get a preview and so this is saying thick inside one thick in middle or thick in side two they can cut essentially so I'm going to set it to side two the previews inside the part and cut up that body and there we'll have our area to be over moulded I'm going to do the same workflow to create the overmolding itself I'm going to copy those internal faces select that face or that surface excuse me that surface and I'm going to thicken the surface and in this case you might want to go actually point one yep and I'm going to uncheck merge I want this to be multi body right and now I've created that overmolding that I wanted on this model so I have my pre model kind of injection molded part and then I also have my over molded portion so I can create these multi body parts that represent over molded operations very easily so let's hop right back last thing is split lines and hold lines I want to create something that we probably use every day or every other day and that's start where and if you've ever looked at some of these containers they're remarkably complicated hats off to whoever has to design this so let's talk about making this Tupperware piece because it's a little bit more involved than you'd think and we can do it very easily with surfacing and I really want to focus on hold lines because that's a Filat tool that I don't think you hardly anyone knows about so I'm just going to start my corner this is a square so everything is you know symmetrical so why model for sides when I couldn't are four corners when I can model one corner and mirror it all at the end so we'll start with one corner and then we'll draft it nothing crazy there next now this is hard to see this isn't the best image but what this has done is I'll just go to the next image which will explain kind of what has happened there is a plane on the back at 45 degrees that has these splines and all I've done is that split surface that split face command to split up the faces of my drafted extra part now this is the command that most people don't know about and it is called hold line so I will get into it and show you what it does is allows the Filat to adjust the radius based on a at the end of the face so what you say is you'll pick the the faces involved and then you'll choose where it should end the radius and so the notice in here we have a much tighter radius fill it than we do out of the at the ends it makes this model look quite a bit nicer creates that Juergen ah McShea p-- no I don't have constant radius Phil it's my Philip's radius is non constant same thing we've done before we're gonna use knit or coffee surface I prefer coffee surface but in this case I mentioned knit and then we'll do thicken will knit and thicken knit and thicken more right I've created those steps nothing crazy you'll notice this is still a solid model we're just using some surfacing tools to create some additional features mirror the whole thing shell it out and then sweep a lip and you're done so we are running a little over so I'm not going to go through all of this with you but I do want to mention that's hold line real quick in the surface in the Philip and so all right so we're all the way back to here basically here's that model and there's that sketch that is so poorly done in that presentation I need to work on that and this is that fill it right so we get this very nonlinear you know adjusting fill it and that looks very nice especially if we're doing consumer product design this type of an operation looks very clean so what we've done here is first and foremost we've split up these faces right so I have this essentially this line right so the actual Filat in here if we come and open it up is a face fill it as the fill it type so what we're gonna do is come up and create a fill it again I'm going to choose a face fill it and then I'm going to pick the items to fill it and this is where most people stop using the Philip command and these parameters are wildly valuable instead of a symmetric fill it we can do a symmetric chord with and hold line hold line is just gonna ask for what is that line right so we're gonna pick that edge of that face you'll see it makes this very non constant radius fill it for the corner of my part and when I finish that it makes a very appealing shape for in this case a piece of Tupperware you could use this again countless different areas you can literally use just the split line command under curves to create the profile you want your excuse me your fill it to follow and then your Phillip will follow that non-constant fill it again I appreciate your time today and joining us for this webinar and I look forward to seeing you next time [Music]

Channel: GoEngineer

Views: 13,758

Keywords: goengineer, engineering, MCAD, mechanical engineering, product design, product development, solidworks, surfacing, hybrid, modeling

Id: 3qMXunTFMzg

Length: 40min 16sec (2416 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020