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(continued...) Despite the wide range of surface specific tools buttons, the SurfaceWorks interface will be familiar to SolidWorks users with a feature manager down the left of the graphics area.
Entities can be viewed from parent surfaces down through driving curves to points or from the child entity back up.
A second pane indicates entities in the current selection set while a third displays entities available for selection according to set selection filters or suitability for the current command.
In SurfaceWorks relationships are captured as part of each entities definition during creation.
This means that there is a wide range of creation tools, one for each entity type such as a Bead which as a point on a curve must by definition be coincident with its parent curve.
Points are used to define curves of which there are eighteen types and these are subsequently used to create up to fifteen main surface variants.
In addition to arcs, lines and helices, curves include B-splines which creates a continuous imitation of the polyline that passes through all the control points but only itself passes through and maintains tangency to the polyline at the first and last control points.
In a C-spline the curve passes through all the control points.
B-spline and C-spline snakes are similar but are constrained to lie on a surface.
Other generated curves include intersection snakes, projected or relative curves and mirrored curves.