Anybody ever used SurfaceWorks??

I was wondering if anyone ever used surfaceworks and is it any good. Is it
parametric to solids created in SW or is it just independant surfaces and
when you change the underlying solids it goes to hell
http://www.aerohydro.com/index.html

 

It's a very good surfacer, parametric and associative with SW data. If you
need Rhino / Alias modeling but want something more associative, then
Surfaceworks is cool. The terminology is maybe a little quirky, but it's
fairly understandable. You build from sketch / curve / edge data and it
has a feature tree, but it's not history driven. It's fairly easy to
learn, and has a decent tutorial, but the interface isn't as "developed" as
the SW interface. It has pretty much remained the same for the past few
years, with minor improvements.

matt

 

You can create some pretty aesthetic surfaces with it and have them
associative to SW.

You will find it a bit difficult to learn their lingo. It makes little
effort to follow SW conventions.

You will find it little or no use in repairing imported geometry.

 

Oops and I almost forgot, pricewise it is a bit steep and it uses a very
restrictive licensing scheme (read if you change or reformat your hard
drive you will be asking for a new license unless you remember to export
it).

Rhino and geometry works are two others I would have a look at.

 

It's used quite a bit in the marine industry (as it allows development of
multi curved surfaces to flat plate shapes - essential for plating hulls of
yachts/ trawlers in steel/aluminium). I have a customer that uses it to
design his boats as the stand alone version (multisurf) and then emails me
the IGES file output for internal detailing in Solidworks. It seems less
intuiative to use than Rhino or the other package used a lot in the marine
industry - Maxsurf from the (very) brief play I had with it, but did seem to
keep relationships between surfacing work and solids created from them
(intersection curves) in line, but this was with a very simple test with two
or three parts created from one of their standard models, so dunno if this
would scale up to a full model, carrying out complex surfacing commands and
changing the shapes of surfaces radically.