Now that I read your reply carefully, you probably want to show the die "straight" open. You could do someting similar to my last post if you have a lot of "in context" relationships, or with configs and mates, or--------- Mike Eckstein
Hello SMA. "You are a tool designer and ACAD is still the best all around tool for that type of work. "... You're either a real good salesman, or the first authority I've read who speaks the truth. If you listed all the engineering disciplines by order that they benefited from 3d, dies would be at the bottom. "1) SW can very accurately unfold a part a bend at a time" ... Individual bend control. What better way to play with form progressions, eh. Although I found out bends only go from folded to flat. Occasionally need incremental bending (flat to 45 to 90) "2) .... Very important. With featureworks, you can make dumb models fully parametric with relative ease."... I'm looking forward to that. So often have to remove a fillet to extrude a toolbody too. But dose it really work? I have many problems with imported geometry in IV. Often parts get translated a couple of times before I get it. The 3d world is a solid mess it seems. I'm hoping parasolids long history makes it a better translator. Until/if the world unifies on one kernel, dumb solid tools are very appealing. "3) The configured part can be patterned and used as the basis for your 2D strip design."... you betcha. Number one desire. Even if I design in 2d, want the strip in 3d. So often in design reviews people have no ideal what they are looking at and prevents them from giving good input. With a 3d iso, my grandma can tell what's going on. But the big question, do station configs actually work. Well SMA has said all the right things to support his knowledge of dies. If he says it dose, I'll take his word as the voice of authority. "ideally you want pre & post operation, so you can overlap parts with different configs to achieve this."... in 2d I show strip in pre-hit position. In 3d you have to show post-hit. But in 3d, easy to add another strip and feed it one station. At least for checking. I've even assembled 2 strips, one progression apart, then boolean subtract and you get the pre-hit remnant and slugs too! "4)... - great for quoting." ... I never thought of that. a dummy die controlled with a few parameters you can instantly get weights/cost from. Excellent! Combine that with featureworks to deconstruct a part into stations, and a strip template ready made to accept the station configs. You could have a real good picture in no time. I wonder if that's how QuickQuote (quickpress) works? "5) Variational details that you do over and over "... dies certainly could make use of a 3d library. A lot of planning to preset parameter for bom though. I believe you can specify which sketch dimensions can be used in the drawing at the part level, for auto dimensioning on the print... A way to facilitate detailing of the library part. What would be best, if individual detail drawings of library parts could be ready-made, then pasted into a sheet. I would guess this is not possible, in any package. "6) Full blown die design on SW is absolutely clunky." ... telling it like it is instills more confidence than a big surprised later. "Dealing with fasteners is a pain, all the parametric fudging"... Oh no, I'm getting scared, care to elaborate? I know screws are a pita, what parameter fudging? I've heard params in SW are not as good as IV, which seem very easy. "and frankly the drafting is somehow not clean"...One advantage IV has, I think, is the drawing side. Given all that it is doing, quite fast. And prints are clean and nice as they get. Makes a tough decision. Do you want to be with a pretty girl, or hang with your buddies. Know what I mean??? "it's tough to get a "simplified" side view" ... no different in IV. Big advantage to 2d. I'm thinking of having a generic side of lifters and punch lengths and such. Then section just the unique stuff on the tool. "Nesting for a stick punch layout for wire EDM? Forget it!"... lol HEY BIG QUESTION... Sw has ordinate dimensioning??? Anyone written auto-ordinate programs? "7) Large drawing sets"... I know. Last job I detailed 4 stage tools in one 2d drawing complete. Must have been 40 sheets crammed with details. + plans, boms, order sheets... all in one 8 meg file. They don't update, details might not match the plans, but you can zoom to any detail in a second. In 3d you spend 30% of the last half of design waiting on files to open. Can SW have 10 sheets in one file? Does that one file take forever to open? One print per detail would be slick for end customer, but try to run that through a shop. "8) On the upside if you want to do full 3D designs, there is no CNC prep"... well a lot of times you have to close up holes and pockets to single point machine. Another + for configs, a "designed" and "CNC" config. "I have used 3D at times to develop a complex forming operation" .... I've said it many times, 3d makes the hard stuff easy, and the easy stuff hard. "DISCLAIMER:" ... I have designed dies for 17 years now. Probably 400 - 500 designs, not little ones either. Designed first 3d die with acad r10 (for money, not play), been designing or supplementing design with a parametric modeler for 4 years... outside of SW specifics which I have no knowledge of, I agree with everything SMA has said. But we're not giving up yet. Are we? Thank you SMA.
Showing a "clam shell" view certainly is the most descriptive single view you can have of a die. But constraints make it hard to drive that. I was talking about pulling the die straight apart. Just like that mold would be in the open position, with the ejectors out. But open in a die is pretty cool. We got a lot of sprung components that move. Plus the whole strip. Best thing about 3d is showing the die open. I'm assuming SW can config an assy by changing constraints. Right?
I hear you Matt. When I saw sketch blocks the first thing I thought about was sketching a whole die with the blocks. I've read others talk about using split method, so I started there. There are a couple of die specific add-ons. Twice the cost of SW though. Now we're talking close to the price of UG's die package, which I hear is killer. I may take your advice. Thanks.
Hello Diemaker, Since having multiple parts in a single file seems important to you, you might want to check out IronCAD. You can create the entire assembly in one file without using tricks. Kevin
Thanks for the good input RR. IV's viewing mechanism is terrific. SW ALWAYS rotates on COG??? Oh, no, that's a big one. I'm thinking I need a demo to find out what other surprises are in store. Not being able to center viewing spin in SW would gnaw on me like not having configs in IV. Spaceball lets you center spin? Or just faster to spin, pan, zoom? IV has no dual processor capability, except for plug-ins, rendering and FEA I think. They tried with the early releases but had problems. If CPU power stays flat, that's the route everyone will have to take, eh. I wonder if microsoft got some built in multitasking with IBM's chip they developed for the xbox. Hehe, that would be funny if powerPC takes the lead right after Apple switches to Intel. Adsk DWF doesn't have edges either. They just added dynamic slicing, but only capped. I think adding slicing killed their perspective view, thats gone now. Edrawings vastly better in every direction. We've had zero problems with machine coding from .sat files. But adsk is modifying it's kernel and wonder when it will have to create a new format. Cnc code could be a gotcha. "I would rather work with Inventor but Solidworks serves us better..." If it weren't for the 3 things I mentioned up front, I'd be happy. Those 3 things have been a real killer tho.
It still doesn't work really well though as the enter of the screen is still rotating too far in or out. Noticable on long parts. What you currently have to do is select a vertex to rotate around. Problem here is the selection is not remembered and has to be made after each command. The other better option is the "Zoom to selection" which sets the rotation center on the feature and holds it til the next zoom. This works well. Siolidworks has responded on their forums that they have this corrected in 2007.
Matt, maybe once every week or two (SWks 2005), my center of rotation flips from the standard default, to Center of Screen, and I have never ever understood what I did to cause it. With my small parts, I rarely have a need to rotate on anything but Center of Gravity, but with longer parts it starts to be an issue. Is there a hot key which causes the center of rotation to flip, as I suspect there must be? I attempted to use SolidWorks Help to find an answer but didn't get one, and didn't think it important enough to call my VAR yet. Many Thanks - Bo
You know, I've seen that happen, and I can't think of what's causing it. The setting is in the registry, so there's something going on there which is a bit frightening. There is no default hotkey that toggles it, but you can look in the menu to see if one is listed there for you. Matt
RR did eventually state how SW works in regards to screen rotations. The only thing he really said is that he prefers IV's method to SW method. He actually listed two ways to rotate about a specific point in SW. One method involves the mouse and the other involves an extra piece of software called a Spaceball. I use a Spaceball, but I can work just as well with a mouse. SW mouse method of screen rotation is to let the user hover over an edge or vertex and click select it whereas IV automatically selects the face under the cursor. I much prefer selecting a specific vertex or edge when working in complex assemblies (read dies, molds, etc.). The method I use for navigating the 3D graphics is as follows. Define hotkeys Q, W, and D to put SW into Zoom to Selection, Window Zoom and Rotate. The F key is already defined as Zoom to Fit. Place your left hand on the keyboard and you will see that you can hit all these keys with the left hand as well as the Z keys. The mouse hand then stays on the mouse and you will have all you need to navigate graphics quickly and smoothly. The reason I use a SpaceBall is that I can not only rotate and zoom in and out/up and down, but I can pick up part in an assembly and move it into location while rotating the model with the mouse. The spaceball also allows me to do quicky animations by rotating the model about an axis. SW does take advantage of multitasking when doing certain things in drawings. Since you do complicated sections you would probably see that improvement. If you use SW addins for stamping you may very well be able to use dual or multicore processors. Don't count on eDrawings. I have about a 50% success rate. The most recent problem was that the customer was not allowed to load an exe file. In house we use them alot.
Middle (scroll wheel) click on axis, then middle (scroll wheel) hold & drag / zoom. Unless I'm missing something here? SW2006. Greg
We were talking about how the switch at View > Modify > Rotate about screen center seems to get mysteriously turned on sometimes, not about how to rotate about a selected point.
And to add to the eDrawings saga, it is not a Solid Works only tool. It is made by Geometric Software Solutions and Solid Works just resells it for their software. The Viewer is free and the Professional version can be purchased directly from GSS for the following CAD systems: Pro/E, Inventor, Catia, NX, and Solid Edge. http://www.geometricsoftware.com/edrawings/default.asp Ken
Ken, That was an interesting link. I dug through it and came up with a couple interesting factoids. Geometric has about 1,100 employees, most of which are in a south asian country. About 75% of the workforce is 29 or younger. The average personel expense is about $9,451 per person. I would guess a similar company in the US would have an average personel expense quite a bit higher. They spent a whopping $73,428 on software tools in 2005. That is company wide IIRC. A fortune 500 company I used to work for spent that much on a single workstation in the early 90s. Their $36,000 tax bill really had to hurt. So a couple conclusions. That 75% of the workforce is entry level to 7 years of experience. That inflation plus a newly formed middle class will drive expectations higher during the lifetime of the workforce. I wonder where they will be in 30 years. We had the baby boom. They have the bit boom. And finally, communication of product definition has to be top down and is well filtered from the end user.
I imagine if the technology is worth it, somebody will buy it and make it their own. Apparently it isn't "all that"! Ken
Please review www.3dquickpress.com for a complete SolidWorks Die Design solution. Please contact for live demonstration times via the web.
ken, I'd like to clarify that Edrawings is NOT made by GSSL and resold by Solidworks, but the other way around. Edrawings is a Solidworks owned and patented technology and GSSL is involved with developing it for other programs such as you listed. If someone buys edrawings for IV, UG or Pro, some of that goes back into Solidworks pocket. Just wanted to make sure you were aware.
Well, considering that GSS is not in the marketing/sales business for consumer products, but rather the business of building translator/viewers/integrations for the major CAD vendors, I would be more inclined to believe that SolidWorks has contracted GSS to produce the initial SolidWorks version and has been free to expand it for other applications since they own part of the copyright. FYI, SolidWorks has only 8 patents to their name and Edrawings nor any of the technology used within is listed. The only registered Edrawings item listed for them is the Edrawings trademark (which isn't a patent). JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE YOU WERE AWARE. Ken
