SUMMARY
SolidWorks® Premium bridges the gap between industrial design and engineering by providing powerful surfacing capabilities, the ability to easily import geometry from dedicated industrial design tools, and the industry’s top mechanical engineering environment—all rolled into one package. In this paper, you will learn how SolidWorks software provides a complete modeling environment for taking designs from concept to manufacturing.
Introduction
The consumer products industry faces a unique set of challenges because it must quickly bring new products to market with cutting-edge designs, market-leading functionality, and competitive manufacturing costs. One of the most critical demands is managing the transition from design to engineering. Today, consumer product designers use specialized tools to define the flowing surfaces
that often distinguish state-of-the-art industrial design. Mechanical engineers,
however, use different tools to turn the designers’ creations into mathematically
precise, functional, and manufacturable designs. Unfortunately, these individual tools have separate interfaces that require a time-consuming and error-prone translation process or that involve starting over when moving from one world to the other.
As an industrial designer you may use sketchpads, modeling clay, foam, and specialized software tools that are fine for conceptualizing complex surfaces. But when the design process is completed, these tools provide only a fraction of the information needed to fully define the design. For example, industrial design software doesn’t generate the parametric history
that is crucial to efficiently managing the engineering change process. Because the software only defines a surface model, you may find it difficult to move to a physical prototype. The solid volume beneath the surface often affects its appearance, such as when the surface is glass. When you create a physical prototype with a surface model, you end up with additional work, because the surface model doesn’t define wall thickness, hole depth, inlays, or connections between components.
Life would be much simpler if industrial designers could use the solid modeling tools used by mechanical engineers. With these tools, you can create a feature-based, parametric model that captures all the information needed to mathematically
define the design and to manage the change and documentation process. But traditional solid modeling software doesn’t have the surfacing tools that you need to quickly generate the large number of design concepts to create an advanced design. Instead, you are locked into confined areas that limit you, for example, to defining a surface patch with either two or four sides, but not three, five, or more sides.
SolidWorks Corporation has overcome this problem by offering a parametric solid modeling tool with the powerful surfacing capabilities needed to turn out a stylish consumer product with smoothly flowing lines and distinctive features. Within the same interface and with exactly the same file format, SolidWorks 3D CAD software provides the geometry definition, geometrical design, design analysis, manufacturing, and documentation tools—which your company’s engineers and suppliers are probably already using—to turn concepts
into reality. As a result, industrial designers and mechanical engineers can seamlessly share information and work simultaneously on the same model. This, in turn, makes it possible to move to market much more quickly, and to evaluate the functionality and manufacturability of your concept designs before investing time and money.
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