Budding and fellow cadjunkies, you are in for a treat! Adam’s good friend and industrial design colleague Arvin Abadilla has offered to share a SolidWorks surfacing quick tip with us this week, and it’s a gem! (We’re particularly enthused about using the ‘split entities’ tool in Sketcher to isolate b-rep edges on the final trim.) But don’t take our word for it: drum roll please… take it away, Arvin!
Overview
Hi Everybody, I’m new to CadJunkie and am excited about all the great content on here! Hopefully I can help contribute and lend a helping hand.
I just wanted to share a surfacing technique that I found useful for blending tubular joints. I’ll walk you through it on a bicycle-like joint below.
For you SolidWorks 2011 users, feel free to download the part file below and follow along:
Tutorial Files
1.The Tubes
So you have 2 tubular surfaces terminating into one tube. How do you get that beautiful blend in there?
2. The Sketch!
It all begins with the sketch, which you’ll use to project onto the surface using the split line tool.
Note that the sketch has been broken up into segments shown below by the points in red circles.
Later, you’ll see how the placement of these points determines how you can grab onto the edges
once they are trimmed away.
*Note that on the arcs at the top and bottom of the sketch, I’ve gone back and right-clicked “split entities” to break it up.
3. Delete Face
Once you have used the sketch + spli line tool to break up the surfaces of the tubes, you can now select them and delete the faces.
After the face has been deleted, you can run your mouse over the trimmed edges and see exactly how those points in
the sketch determined what edges you can select. This is very important, as you will probably need to go back and tweak
the sketch to get just the right edges for the upcoming blends.
4. Surface Lofts
Lets start with the middle blend. Select the inner two edges for a surface loft and set the Start/End Constraints to “tangency to face”.
You can play with the number below to increase your tangency and tweak the look and flow of the blend.
You’ll do the same for the top and bottom blends.
Top Blend
Bottom Blend
5. Surface Fill
This is my favorite part! You’re now ready to cap off the sides to complete your bicycle frame blend. I find surface fills
super useful for those non four-sided surfaces. The quality of this surface will depend on the surface lofts above, which
depend on the sketch used for the split line. If the quality of this surface fill isn’t good enough, you may have to go back
in the feature tree and rework some of those surface lofts or the original split line sketch.
Just select all the open edges on this side of the frame and you’ll be treated with that beautiful yellow mesh. Select “tangent”
in the drop down box of the properties manager and then check “apply to all edges” underneath.
6. Done!
Just mirror that patch over to the other side, knit the surfaces, and you’ve got a beautiful blend!
@ Andrew:
Yes, it’s been quite a learning process (often in retrospect!) to understand the importance of a solid sketch foundation. Seems like a lot trickles down from that initial foundation that can either make life more easy or difficult for you.
@ Eugene:
Thanks! And I should be posting a new one soon, so keep your eyes peeled.
In the meantime, if there’s anything that you’re interested in seeing, let me know and if it’s something I’m familiar or have any experience with, I can give it a shot.
wow.. amazing tutorial. makes it look so easy and simple.
Thank you for a great tutorial.
Very nice. What I especially like about this tutorial is that it shows the importance of getting the preliminaries right to obtain the desired result. Had those seemingly unimportant breaks in the sketch lines not been placed correctly, or not been there at all, this surfacing technique wouldn’t have worked. Other similar tutorials I’ve seen neglect to mention that, leaving it up to the student to figure out what went wrong.