nurbs in solidworks

does anyone have a recomendation for a good nurb surfacer for use
inside soliworks. i have recently downloaded 2 differnent evaluation
versions of Surfacing or NURB tools and they both suck. the surfaceing
tool was GeometryWorks which repeated a bunch of already available SW
surface tools with very little new or usable tools that i could see.
the NURB add-in was ShapeWorks. this makes nice NURB surfaces but they
cannot link to SW features. it seems like the "replace face" feature
in SW works with the new NURB surface but once you modify the surface
to the point where the original boundries are changed everything blows
up.

anyone have a better recomendation?

-Jon

 

Ask Paul over at www.zxys.com
As you can see, he does some awesome surfacing in SW.

 

If you like direct NURBS modeling, SW is a poor choice. The standard
responses to NURBS questions are Rhino and SurfaceWorks. Rhino can be
used in a semi-parametric fashion if you know SW well. SurfaceWorks
is pretty powerful and has a nicer integration, but the integration
isn't complete. You wind up working in a separate window, but the
surfaces you create can be edited.

If you're going to do shapes in SW, it is best to do them natively in
SW. If you feel you can't make it happen, your best choice is to look
at another package that handles complex shapes differently.

 

BTW what happened to the surface patch tangency improvements that were 'due'
originally in SW06 ? I read SW07 may have deformable surface but that is a
lesser priority IMHO. Any half insider news to share matt? )

 

If I said everything I hear, my sources would probably dry up ;o)


The push-pull surface was shown publicly at SWW, so that's easy to
talk about. That will be a welcome addition, hoping of course that
there are no limitations like 4 sided patches only.

As for other stuff, I really can't say. I keep asking for c2
everywhere where appropriate, and to make it work where it already
exists. Loft end conditions can have c2, but it only works in certain
situations. Fill surfaces don't have c2, but I heard that it was
somewhat better than c1 (does that make it c1.5?).

Anyway, keep hoping for the best. Actually, enhancement requests are
better than hope, because someone actually looks at them.

 

I can't really say it is better, but the price probably is. head over
to
http://www.plasmadevelopment.com/software
there is a solidworks nurbs editor i have written up for download
there.

check it out, and let me know what you think.

-Andrew

 

is it the same version as before or have you made improvements/fixes ?

 

nope, nothing new. I've been trying to figure out how to turn this into
an add-in, but still retain its ability to add the surface as a custom
"macro feature"...

 

You didn't figure out why it doesn't work for some of us by any chance?

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz

 

I have yet to run in to this problem myself, so its a bit hard to
debug. I am building a new machine today, so maybe the issue will show
up there and i'll be able to better diagnose it.