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Surfacing Course : Q & A ?

With the technological advances in software in the last 5 years, I reckon the gap between Engineering and Industrial Design is closing fast. It seems many ID`ers now are getting to grips with most of the main stream 3d modelling programs themselves instead of outsourcing.


Maybe you have done yourself out of a little business there Bart
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Heres a new pro-e frustration from me. If creating a simple boss or shaft, then apply a draft angle... Why O Why does pro-e struggle to measure the Diameter of the new shaft ? It seems you can only Measure the surface, and even then the figures I get seem to be Random!! Why cant I pick the edge ? I know I can use Distance, point to point, but this just seems ridiculous... and should be so simple.


The example below is a 40mm dia at the bottom and 30mm at the top, the diameter measurement gives me a random 34.9907
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[-Skint- said:
]


With the technological advances in software in the last 5 years, I reckon the gap between Engineering and Industrial Design is closing fast. It seems many ID`ers now are getting to grips with most of the main stream 3d modelling programs themselves instead of outsourcing.
Click to expand...


I wish that was true of our Industrial design department though I think there problem is they made a conscious effort not be anything like an engineer.Maybe that's just so when engineering problems occur they can shrug their shoulders and say nothing to do with me, I just made it look nice.
 
Wikipedia is my favorite....



A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts.


In other words, it is a bipartition of elements. i.e.
nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and everything must
belong to one part or the other. They are often contrasting and spoken
of as "opposites."
 
design-engine said:
industrial design masters degrees still struggle with this process because they cant let the manufacturing process down for a minute to make concept sketches.
Click to expand...


Guys with ID degrees but with an Engineering mindset can't either. My degree is ID, my title & work has been primarily engineering. I was never, even in design school, able to come up with all those concepts. I can't ignore the process required or the details to be thought through. My brain doesn't work that way.


Sometimes I think I got the wrong degree, except that I love design. ID needs folks like me with the sensitivity to form to be able to take those beautiful shapes and make them reality. it drives me crazy to see a beautiful form dumbed down to what the engineer charged with developing it could understand.


design-engine said:
If you ever get the chance to work in a team with industrial designers you may change your mind.
Click to expand...


I'll second that. A little shameless plug, Industrial Designers specialize in creative thinking and problem solving. That applies to functional challenges as well as form. We recently had a project for a mechanical problem that the client had been working on for months. We had it for 2-3 weeks and the natural creative ID process got us to a better solution than they had in almost 2 years.


It's what we do. Looking at things differently comes naturally to the Industrial Designer. That part of the ID brain I got. The 'sketch 200 versions of a toaster' -not so much.
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It was good to meet you at the conference doug. We found our nest in the process you could say. I am an ME btw but I dress like a designer. Anyone see my link above. Design Engine had a blow out. Those videos were taken at around 1AM and I had not even had a drop to drink. Yet.




Edited by: design-engine
 
ANXIETY < I did not know what that is either

I did not know what anxiety is until I got married.... divorced.... But when I figured it out I realized I had Anxiety even as a kid on the race track. I called it butterflies and they were always in your stomach. Even after I looked up the word Anxiety i did not know what it meant.... Until marriage.


Edited by: design-engine
 
[-Skint- said:
]


Heres a new pro-e frustration from me. If creating a simple boss or shaft, then apply a draft angle... Why O Why does pro-e struggle to measure the Diameter of the new shaft ? It seems you can only Measure the surface, and even then the figures I get seem to be Random!! Why cant I pick the edge ? I know I can use Distance, point to point, but this just seems ridiculous... and should be so simple.


The example below is a 40mm dia at the bottom and 30mm at the top, the diameter measurement gives me a random 34.9907
smiley5.gif
Click to expand...


You may have already figured this one out but create an offset datum plane then create a datum point on the surface and use the offset datum and one of the vertical planes as offset references. Create your analysis feature and where it says point select the point that you create on the surface. Put the diameter value in the model tree and you can see how the diameter changes as you change the offset of the datum plane.
 
You can also create a sketched line along the axis of your feature and create a Field Point for the datum plane to pass through. This will allow you to create a UDA to measure the diameter of the surface along the sketched curve.
 
There are quite a few work-arounds... but I just want pro-e to let me get the diameter of the top surface just by selecting Measure Diameter.


Once you add a draft to something the measure tool seems to go tits up.


smiley36.gif
@ Bart, great video.
 
the one of me on the skate board the the roller girl dropping in with roller skates?

Do your measure in insert mode before the draft feature exists. The measure tool measures (like in Calculus) the diameter of the selection point of where you select on the cone.
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Edited by: design-engine
 
You can put a point on the top and bottom edge to get the diameter measurements of the ends of the cone.
 
I got sick of having " Uncompatable Software " issues with Autocad, me still using Lt98 lol. I recieved my LT2009 today, jeeeez its a bit different
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isnt it ? Another bit of software to learn lol.
 
I remember back when AutoCAD users would complain about Pro/E..... Back in 1992 Autocad users bucked the new deal and complained about the drafting of Pro/ENGINEER. Skint.... What the h*ll are you doing with Autocad?
 
Haha, i know mate I know... but i have sooo many old cad files lying around, its just so much easier having a copy of cad about to go with em :) Also, i get lots of files sent by suppliers etc in CAD and I hate having to sift through them when pro-e cant preview them before opening.


I still do some detailing in cad too, even if i do create the drawings with pro-e.


I remember using AutoCAD release 8 and trying to create 3d looking models... in 2d ofcourse :p
 
Back in the day about 13 years ago, I worked or a company that designed CMM checking fixtures in ACAD 12. They had a bunch of non-networked DOS based PCs. We got the job to design a fixture for the original Dodge Viper Coupe trunk pan.


They sent us an IGES surface model. Zipped it was something like 13MB and we didn't have CD drives on our PCs. So,they used a DOS utility creatively named Splitter to split the zip file into 10 or so 1.4MB floppy sized chunks.


So we received a stack of floppies. We'd copy each of them onto the hard drive and then run Splitter to join them back into one zip file. Then we'd un-zip it and open the IGES in Acad. Took the better part of an hour just to get the file open. We'd then create 2D cross sections where we needed and each of those took 10-15 minutes. Those we'd flip to a common plane and then we could lay out our drawing for the fixture.


if we needed to plot, we had to generate a plot file, put it on a floppy and take it over to the old PC that drove the plotter. It was crippled and not able of much of anything except executing a PRINT command to send the file to the plotter, which ironically, was a pretty darn nice new HP ink-jet plotter.


Ah, memories ...
 
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