Is SolidWorks a Drafting System?

Sorry I can't help it.

Back to Bertoline (the book), or French for that matter.

In the stick and paper drafting days we had:

orthographic projection (the most common)

oblique projection (very useful and easy)

isometric (tedious, but usedful) and a subset of axonometric projection.

perspective (well industrial designers have to have something to do)

And there are more but these will suffice because they are/were common.

Just out of curiousity how many of these can SW do? Three you say? Wrong,
only two carry into a drawings, orthographic projections (and their
auxiliary views) and axonometric projections. Where are oblique and
perspective? It never hit me before but these two friends are conspicuous
by there absence. Perspective would be nice to have carry over, but the
command is unavailable in draft mode.

Oblique would be a real stinker for a CAD program, but is very useful as a
communication tool. And, hey, ACAD can do it.

 

Perspective views are possible on SW drawings by making a named view in the
model while the display has perspective turned on, and then using that
named view on the drawing.

Could you simulate an oblique projection by making an Auxiliary view from
an Isometric?

matt

 

I had to really dig to find oblique views. I found them in a book
where everyone had crewcuts and horn-rimmed glasses. No brown people,
either. America in the 50's, I guess.

Oblique views are not really relevant in modern CAD drafting, where
there are so many better ways of representing an object. Adding
oblique views to 3D CAD would be like ensuring that all automobiles had
harnesses in case you wanted a horse to pull you around.

It was not difficult to find in SW help how to add perspective views to
a drawing.

 

.... I found them in a book where everyone had

D-FENS

 

"P."

"P.",
I an assembly or part model, turn on perspective, orient to your liking
and then save a named view. In drawing mode, insert view by selecting the
previously saved named view.

 

Didn't think to look in help. My nitpick there is that it should be
selectable in the same way shaded, HLR and HLV are from the view commands.

French would be the old stick and paper book. But Bertoline is up to date
AND exhaustive.

I pulled an old Audel's Machinists and Toolmaker's Handy Book off the shelf
and it fell open to a page which had an oblique view on it. (Audel's
Machinists and Toolmakers Handy Book, 1941/42, Theo Audel & Co., p909). The
illustration on page 1100 shows the real power of these views. They are
illustrating scribing lines on a surface plate. The lines of most
importatance are shown true, but the sense of depth and positioning of the
surface gauge are represented by the 3rd dimension. The book frequently
used oblique instead of axonometric projection for the fourth view in many
drawings.

Oblique is an interesting projection and would have use for certain
applications. Napkin sketching is one. Illustrations for end users is
another. Oblique has one advantage, it shows the object in 3D, but shows
the front view true to size and shape. You draw the front view and then add
depth by projecting 45 degrees up and to the right. This means that on 2
1/2 D stuff you can show the whole object in one view and have the
important features true to size and dimensioned.

 

In two of the last three jobs I have had, drafting was the end
product. The job with the fastest timeline went straight to CNC and
didn't bother. They were a tooling shop. Of course the customer had
drawings.

The other two were OEMs and they had to have paper just to sell their
product as well as for a formalized manufacturing system.

I wouldn't say lazy. They do have some very useful applications,
especially for illustrative purposes in user instructions.

Well we know how to deal with this one. SW enhancement web site.

The current method of creating a view in the part or assembly is very
ProEngineer like (for those who have made section views in Pro/E).

I hope not. I don't want to live in a Matrix dream world. We are
constraining our lives (work and play) around what computers are
capable of. The human mind is highly underrated these days.

 

I would agree that oblique view has some use. I've been using it for
hand sketches without knowing what it was called. I still don't think
it's very relevant to CAD, where it is a simple matter to just add
another view. If my personal financial resources were tied to
development of a CAD program, that money had better be spent on
something more important.

 

It is hard to find a board draftsman these days. Even the word draftsman has
faded from use in favor of draftsperson. I know one up in Michigan, 90+
years old and still very good at what he does. Even he was looking at SW.

I think the crux of this issue is not the medium, but the limitations on
what can be done because of the medium. I think we agree the final product
must communicate something useful about the object(s) being described.
Manual drafting has a lot of limitations, especially when it comes to
change and making information easily available. But the medium also limits
to some extent the creative ways that have, in the past, been developed to
communicate data.

I remember the first time I used Pro/E to develop prints for a small
stamping. The vendor came back with an outrageous quote. They said we were
asking for features that they would find it very hard to put into the part.
We asked howso? They responded by describing the intersection of the base
trim of the fillet which Pro/E described very accurately. They weren't used
to seeing that, even though with a little discussion they came to realize
that those features would naturally be in any stamping made that way. Hand
drawings left out a lot of details in favor of what was important. CAD
tends to require all the details and would have a hard time deciding which
were necessary to show and which were not. There are a lot of these short
cuts and removal of detail that a computer program would find very hard to
do in the drafting stage.

To open a new can of worms there is now a standard for annotating 3D models
which I don't think SW can do much about. I know this has been discussed
here in the past and some people have found ways to do so, but the methods
seemed awkward methods at best. It seems like moving down this path would
obviate the need for 2D projections and drawings, but SW doesn't seem to be
championing it.

 

(I'm drawing a blank on the name just now.)

ASME Y14.41

There's also an ISO in the works, but don't think it's released yet.

 

I am still using 2004 at work, but for class preparation I use 2005. I
want to do something really simple (I think). I want to create a
simple part and then in a drawing dimension the isometric view so the
students can make a model and 3 view. Is SW going to make this easier?
No-how, no-way.

1. Can't import dimensions to an isometric view. Even so, the import
dimension property manager doesn't communicate this small limitation.
It just doesn't work and doesn't complain.

2. You can however, import dimensions to a front, right or top view
and then change the view to isometric. The dimensions are then shown
dangling.

3. Can't reposition dimensions properly in the isometric view. The
extrusion depth dimensions are especially obnoxious. Also, when using
contour sketches the dimensions are stuck to the sketch plane and
can't be repositioned.

4. Even though true length is checked, manually created dimensions in
the isometric view are showing projected length.

5. Select other is available in the RMB when dimensioning in an
isometric view, but it doesn't work. Not only that, but under certain
conditions is can lock up/prevent selecting anything in the view. This
worked in 2003.

6. GRRR, now I am getting mad. I turn on hidden line and pick a back
edge and a front edge. They are parallel in the model but the
dimension is in degrees. And it isn't just hidden lines. Parallel line
on many lines come out in degrees. This worked in 2003.

7. Diameters are shown as radii in isometric views and can't be
changed.

8. So maybe I can export the isometric view into DWGEditor and
dimension it there. Nope, the geometry is no longer true length. It is
scaled to an odd scale of 1.225. Vertical lines should be translated
true length but they are not.


One of the big problems for SW in making isometric drawings is that it
tends to want to display imported dimensions in the plane in which
they were made, not in the plane appropriate to the projection being
viewed. If dimensions are being placed by hand then they can be made
to lie in the appropriate isometric projection plane.

 

I would be more than happy to go entirely 3D. Fewer files to manage. On the
other hand, 90% of our vendors speak dwg.

 

I got so frustrated that I resorted to SE14 to make my iso views.
Smooth, quick and SE can dimension a hole correctly in iso (read
diameter dimension). It can even drop centermarks on an elliptical
representation of a round hole and put correct dimension between a
centerpoint and an edge.

 

I don't think ANSI Y14.41 or whatever would fly in a dwg.

 

Be sure and tell this to your VAR. Tell it to your SW area manager. If
you're going to SW World, tell it to any SW people you talk to. The best way
to get something fixed is to let SW know that the competition does it
better.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

I was going to compare as I went along with learning SE. Time was not
on my side though. However, the drafting packages in both products do
bear some comparison.

For example, I can pull a drawing into SE without its part, work on it
and file it. Imported dimensions have a problem, but not the manual
dimensions.

On an ISO view I can:

Dimension holes
Dimension edges
Add centermarks
Add centerlines

 

I know they monitor the group. But the group can do the most important work
and that is flooding SW with enhancement requests.

It seems like SE took the time to think through this side of things and did
what is right instead of what is popular. The thing I find daunting about
SE is that they try to control how you work and put things that should be
grouped together in several different places. For example, the control of
dimensions is pretty decent, but I still haven't found out how to get
fractions or dual dimensions. I'm pretty sure it is in there though.

Their smart dimension is dumb as a box of rocks compared to SW. But you can
have the smartest smart dimension in the world and if the basic
functionality isn't there it is of no help.

 

One of the important qualities of a drafting system is control of line
weights when plotting. Especially when blue lines are to be made line
width becomes very important. SolidWorks 2005 does a fair job of this
as far as line fonts for the views. But there is a problem with
annotations. SolidWorks uses the normal line font for annotation
symbols. If the normal font, the one that by default defines the
outline of the part, is set to, say, .6mm, then the annotation symbols
will be drawn with this line font also. This doesn't look very good
unless bold fonts are used for lettering because .6mm is the thicker of
the two widths in the standard.

 

If I decipher your message properly, I think maybe the proper answer for you
is to load SP0.1 - if fixes the issue of blocks printing with darker lines
than they should.

WT

 

Thanks Wayne. As you surmised I am in SP0 of SW2005 for this "test".
However, I am not using blocks. Maybe I wasn't quite clear about what
I was finding. When printing I set the system line widths to .3mm for
thin, .6mm for normal and heavy. This makes the lines used for symbols
print at .6mm. I am not sure the symbols are treated as blocks, but I
will try your fix.