Archive review from 16 February 2003

Review of Inventor
from Autodesk

Advances in hybrid solid and surface modelling

Page 2 of 5

(continued...) Thickening a surface into a solid can create a disjoint volume.

Although this and many other operations can inadvertently create non-manifold solids, there appears to be no obvious way in which this is flagged, with even mass properties reported for the composite, disjoint whole.

Although the Thicken / Offset tool identifies the correct feature type automatically in the history browser, Delete Face is indicated even if the command has in fact removed a solid as a Lump.

Alongside the extended surface modelling capabilities are improved tools for creating and manipulating splines.

Points can be manipulated dynamically and be defined as a bowtie with handlebars to adjust tangency, radius of curvature and curve influence.

The handle can also be dimensioned or constrained to other model entities.

In addition to creating and manipulating surfaces within the normal parametric modelling environment, a construction environment exists to prepare imported data for inclusion in the model.

Tools are available to analyse edge quality and highlight problem areas, add fillets and to knit multiple surfaces into a single quilt.

These non-parametric surfaces can then be promoted into the main modelling environment.

Somehow despite many elements of the interface succeeding in aiding ease of use, other elements such as construction geometry not existing in the construction environment, or surfaces being able to be created in both the surface construction environment and the modelling environment seem to complicate terminology unnecessarily.

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