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Dominoes posted:Solidworks Yeah but Solidworks here is $15k NZD for one seat plus a few thousand a year in maintenance if you want to get updates (and if you don't pay maintenance but want to upgrade in the future they charge you all of the back-maintenance up to the cost of a completely new license). The company/product I'm putting together is pretty niche and I can't justify that much at this point.
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May 26, 2021 01:37
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Blackhawk posted:Yeah but Solidworks here is $15k NZD for one seat plus a few thousand a year in maintenance if you want to get updates (and if you don't pay maintenance but want to upgrade in the future they charge you all of the back-maintenance up to the cost of a completely new license). The company/product I'm putting together is pretty niche and I can't justify that much at this point. Is there anything like the EAA where you are? https://www.eaa.org/eaa/eaa-membership/eaa-member-benefits/solidworks-resource-center/eaa-solidworks-standard But on the other hand, if you want to use it commercially, the Hobbyist/Startup license for Fusion360 is the way to go. Free up to $100kUSD in revenue (though how they find this out IDK). And if you make over 100k in the business you'd better pony up for a real seat of Solidworks and be legitimate. Some Pinko Commie fucked around with this message at 01:43 on May 26, 2021 |
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May 26, 2021 01:40
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Blackhawk posted:Yeah but Solidworks here is $15k NZD for one seat plus a few thousand a year in maintenance if you want to get updates (and if you don't pay maintenance but want to upgrade in the future they charge you all of the back-maintenance up to the cost of a completely new license). The company/product I'm putting together is pretty niche and I can't justify that much at this point. https://www.solidworks.com/solution/company-type/entrepreneurs-startups E: if you're doing more of an Etsy shop than a big business, you can probably get away with the Makers offer this year. I've been making sure the folks at Dassault know that there needs to be a pathway from Makers to Entrepreneur that's easy to find and achieve. EE: biracial bear for uncut posted:Is there anything like the EAA where you are? That is incorrect, lower on the page it reads: quote:NOTICES: (a) The version of SOLIDWORKS that EAA members have access to is for personal use only. You may not use this software to produce designs or products that you intend to offer for sale. NewFatMike fucked around with this message at 02:10 on May 26, 2021 |
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May 26, 2021 02:02
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Blackhawk posted:Quick CAD package question. Onshape is in browser only, fusion is a stand alone program with heavy cloud integration. I do mean heavy, your designs are not local. You can save local copies if you like, but the working copies are and will always be the ones on autodesk's servers. Program upgrades are not optional, functionality when you don't have internet is very degraded, and you do not get a copy of the program to keep around just because you bought it. Onshape is ex-solidworks people, with the goal of producing a complete cad webapp. By every account I've seen, they're doing a good job at it. Fusion is autodesk's second attempt at producing a solidworks killer, this time by aggressively integrating other tools, and cloud functionality. Autodesk's first attempt, inventor, was a more straight forward solidworks clone. It was fine, even good, but lacked a hook to pull someone away from solidworks. I use fusion, like it, and recommend it, but it's no less SaaS cloud poo poo for not running in a browser. I know you're talking buy, but or what it's worth, the free version of onshape disallows commercial use. I don't know what other limitations it may have. The free version of fusion allows up to $1000/yr before you're required to buy a license. Fusion does have other functionality limits, personally I found the 10 active design limit extremely irritating to live with.
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May 26, 2021 06:14
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NewFatMike posted:https://www.solidworks.com/solution/company-type/entrepreneurs-startups biracial bear for uncut posted:But on the other hand, if you want to use it commercially, the Hobbyist/Startup license for Fusion360 is the way to go.
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May 26, 2021 10:36
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Oh derp, not sure how I missed that, my apologies!
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May 26, 2021 19:12
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Blackhawk posted:Quick CAD package question. I use Alibre Design and it is more or less a poor man's Solidworks. I have been using it for years, long before Fusion360 was a thing. If I had the business case for it, I would be on Solidworks in a heartbeat. I also use Fusion360 and I find it to be flaky so I tend to most of my modeling in Alibre and only use Fusion for simulation and PCB layout. Alibre is not cloud based so that is a plus as well.
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May 26, 2021 21:10
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What’s the least painful workflow for producing multi-part casting & injection molds derived from .STL models with no working files available? I know solidworks is the go-to for moldmaking, but it does a particularly bad job of working with .stls. Rhino seems much happier letting you do anything with stls but (in my limited, nonprofessional experience with rhino 6 specifically) doesn’t offer the same bespoke moldmaking workflow you get w SW.
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May 26, 2021 21:58
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I do small multi part molds for wax injecting every now and then, all in rhino. I've never done moldmaking in solidworks so I can't speak to that effect, but if I'm spending the time to make a multipart mold, I will usually rebuild said .STL in editable Rhino files. In the case of sculpted pieces or things I can't recreate as well I'll do my best with what I have, but STLs always give me poo poo when I try to do too many boolean operations in Rhino.
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May 26, 2021 22:22
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I'd rebuild into non-stl files if you can, even if it's a headache, it'll be so much better in the long run. Im assuming you want to add some mechanical design features or something and not just scale and Boolean, so my really bad advice is to use a standin cavity for all our mold core design and then as a final step replace the cavities with your actual scaled cavity from rhino and either import body and cavity separately into CAM or combine them In SW/rhino at the end and hope it goes well, I'm pretty sure the biggest issue is that any mesh booleans on a solid body in SW will turn the body into a mesh and you won't be able to edit, but I'm not 100% sure here.
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May 26, 2021 23:46
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If you don't plan to edit the shape of the finished part at all, Solidworks will work around an STL just fine. Run Feature Recognition and take a nap while it studies a hundred thousand triangle surfaces to make sense of it, then either: -convert the result to a solid body, then go into mold tools and make your mold. -delve into the Surfacing tools and make your edits, convert to solid body, then mold tools. That elides a lot over how loving tedious either process is, but it can be done.
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May 26, 2021 23:53
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ZincBoy posted:I use Alibre Design and it is more or less a poor man's Solidworks. I have been using it for years, long before Fusion360 was a thing. If I had the business case for it, I would be on Solidworks in a heartbeat. I also use Fusion360 and I find it to be flaky so I tend to most of my modeling in Alibre and only use Fusion for simulation and PCB layout. Alibre is not cloud based so that is a plus as well. I always forget about Alibre - Joko Engineering Help on YouTube have a bunch of videos about it. Looks pretty great and it's one of the vanishingly rare software companies that let you buy a permanent license.
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May 27, 2021 00:58
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Claes Oldenburger posted:I do small multi part molds for wax injecting every now and then, all in rhino. I've never done moldmaking in solidworks so I can't speak to that effect, but if I'm spending the time to make a multipart mold, I will usually rebuild said .STL in editable Rhino files. Yeah i’ve had the most luck w rhino so far, for the usual “it rules for bridging file formats/letting disparate design components play well together” reasons. albeit for easy two-part molds with a flat parting line. mesh the stl, boolean operations, yeah. i definitely wanna get into more complicated designs with multiple tool faces; i’d like to do some more advanced molds as proofs-of-concept, like sth that can make draftless mechanical parts with side-cores and the like, and that’s where solidworks becomes worth sticking with. i’m remarkably bad at designing molds b/c i haven’t had to do it for the better part of a decade so i’m getting ahead of myself. biracial bear for uncut posted:If you don't plan to edit the shape of the finished part at all, Solidworks will work around an STL just fine. Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 04:19 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 01:08
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Don't surface in SW whatever you do if you have rhino, just don't. It's bad. Really bad.
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May 27, 2021 02:59
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ZincBoy posted:I use Alibre Design and it is more or less a poor man's Solidworks. I have been using it for years, long before Fusion360 was a thing. If I had the business case for it, I would be on Solidworks in a heartbeat. I also use Fusion360 and I find it to be flaky so I tend to most of my modeling in Alibre and only use Fusion for simulation and PCB layout. Alibre is not cloud based so that is a plus as well. Ahh cool thanks, I'm sure I've seen Alibre before but forgot about it. It seems to be roughly the same price as Onshape which for me isn't too bad, I'll have to look into it. I guess I'd be losing the CAM functionality of Fusion but gaining a perpetual license and not having to deal with cloud BS. EDIT: Although I need sheetmetal functionality which means I'd need the 'expert' version which is twice the price.
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May 27, 2021 04:20
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meowmeowmeowmeow posted:Don't surface in SW whatever you do if you have rhino, just don't. It's bad. Really bad. Yeah, I loving hate surfacing in Solidworks. But then again, most of the designwork I do is straight mechanical so I rarely every have to even think about using those features.
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May 27, 2021 18:37
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What is surfacing?
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May 27, 2021 18:43
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Claes Oldenburger posted:What is surfacing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA2-i34UVUo
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May 27, 2021 19:19
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Thank you! That looks...tedious.
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May 27, 2021 19:45
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Surface modeling whips because it exposes you to the ultimate truth that all 3D models are pinatas, and you can do a lot with that information. Same for the delineation between geometry and topology. If you're working with imported geometry for castings, being familiar with the concepts will help you figure out what the error messages mean. Sometimes. Otherwise yes, very tedious 
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May 27, 2021 20:36
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Claes Oldenburger posted:Thank you! That looks...tedious. Surfacing is simultaneously tedious for things that are easy with solid modeling, and quick for jobs that are very difficult with a solid modeler. A mouse is a pretty good example of the latter. Try making the same mouse shape just using the solid tools. Woof. SolidWorks also has a fairly bad workflow for surfacing, though. I don't think surfacing is really all that compatible with a parametric feature tree -- it's just too freeform and has too many inputs. Rhino's mostly history-free workflow is much more natural.
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May 27, 2021 20:52
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What are my options for adding organic/natural-looking textures to parts I'm designing, across SW, Rhino 6, and Aspire? I'm mostly looking to turn perfect-flat plane surfaces into something with a liiiiiiittle bit of roughness and height variability, without any visible tiling or repetition. Also interested in much fancier/more ornamental texturing, being able to simulate hammer-textured metal would rule, for example, but just being able to add some noise to a surface would be a great start.
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May 28, 2021 23:53
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For renders or for actually making parts?
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May 28, 2021 23:57
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SW has 3D Texture and there are certainly other topology tools or plugins out there. I think the Raise 3D slicer will let you apply one directly to an STL? http://help.solidworks.com/2021/English/SolidWorks/sldworks/c_3d_textures.htm?verRedirect=1
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May 28, 2021 23:59
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meowmeowmeowmeow posted:For renders or for actually making parts? Actual parts- my main interest here is making the decorative master models for molds/dies look more organic and authentic, maybe going so far as to deliberately imitate tooling marks to make designs *look* wrought in the correct way they would if i was working with hammer and anvil instead of mouse and keyboard. Looks like creating a shaded heightmap and altering topography according to shade is the usual way it works across SW as well as the others, I’ll start monkeying around with that. Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 20:15 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 20:11
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Hello cad people. I’ve been a long time user, about 22 years and I am currently a design manager. I’ve been using onshape, nx, inventor, solid works, mud box, 3dsmax and more over the years. I started off life as a lowly dork with. A drawing board and worked my way up. I’ve just caught up on the thread and wew the surfacing hate. So by and large solid modellers rely on a good sketch to drive the features in which they are dependant on. If you are able to break up your curve with defined datum points from your ucs using defined sketches in the various x, x n1 (your offset to go from one profile to another) and y (your rail to drive the shape) you can create anything you want. I’ve seen complicated press die geometry created, hydroformed tube sections and plain ol sculptural art created this way. Defining your base sketches and trying to do as much as you can with that single, editable sketch means you can carve and adjust your solid to suit the form you wish to make. Also note sometimes you need to create a surface away from your sweep, loft and other functions, so by using defined sketches you can achieve this in a measurable way. By and large solid works is more user friendly, nx has much more power behind the configuration of its cv’s but will just crash and not tell you why a feature failed to build. Solid works will tell you. So save before creating new features has become a big thing for me during my practise.
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May 29, 2021 22:46
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Ambrose Burnside posted:Actual parts- my main interest here is making the decorative master models for molds/dies look more organic and authentic, maybe going so far as to deliberately imitate tooling marks to make designs *look* wrought in the correct way they would if i was working with hammer and anvil instead of mouse and keyboard. Not sure if it's an option for you but I've always had textures and finishes added via etching after machining the cavities. I think you might have a hard time machining the level of detail you're talking about and having it come through in the finished parts after polishing of the mood to remove the unwanted real tooling marks from mold machining, but ymmv. This has always been in a commercial environment where I can just open the texture reference book and call out some texture codes for certain parts of the cavity, no idea what I'd do if this was a home shop project.
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Jun 2, 2021 17:28
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Ambrose Burnside posted:Actual parts- my main interest here is making the decorative master models for molds/dies look more organic and authentic, maybe going so far as to deliberately imitate tooling marks to make designs *look* wrought in the correct way they would if i was working with hammer and anvil instead of mouse and keyboard. I'm doing a lot with VCarve right now for the makerspace, and they have some texturing tool paths in there. I'm not sure if you can get an STL out of it like a lot of CAM packages to print, but it might be worth checking out.
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Jun 3, 2021 21:32
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meowmeowmeowmeow posted:Not sure if it's an option for you but I've always had textures and finishes added via etching after machining the cavities. I think you might have a hard time machining the level of detail you're talking about and having it come through in the finished parts after polishing of the mood to remove the unwanted real tooling marks from mold machining, but ymmv. This is for a zero-machining rapid tooling process i'm experimenting with, as it so happens! I'm resin printing either the mold masters or the molds themselves, using electroforming and low-melting alloys to capture the full detail available in the printed parts and produce tools that'll survive a couple dozen or hundred working cycles. all geometries are basically equally-easy to produce with this workflow, so I want to go absolutely buck wild with the really indulgent texturing and etc that, yeah, is just really out-of-bounds for a conventionally-machined mold.
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Jun 7, 2021 19:03
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Follow-up: So far, it looks like my concerns about solidworks for making cuts in flat surfaces are valid. Has anyone used SW CAM in this context before? Ie it's trying to obliterate everything not part of the model.
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Jun 7, 2021 23:44
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If you're just cutting something out as a prismatic cut, recognize the feature as a part perimeter feature. Set the type to "Boss" NOT "Open Pocket" and it should just cut along the outside of it. Depending on your work holding setup, you may need to add tabs, which you would do by editing the contour operation the above generates (that opens the operation parameters dialog box), and going to the "Contour" tab. One of the boxes in there will let you add tabs. Although for a 3018, I'd recommend doing the blue tape and super glue holding method so you don't have to worry about those.
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Jun 7, 2021 23:57
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Thank you - that's very encouraging! I'll continue going through the tutorials. And I agree on the tabs. Maybe some sort of breakaway or perforation. Or maybe make sure it finishes the perimeter cut as the very last step per model? Ideally will be able to set this up in a grid. edit: Tricks with tape sound like a nice shortcut - hadn't considered that.
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Jun 8, 2021 00:23
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Painter's tape + super glue is preposterously good for sheet format stock, glad all those were helpful!
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Jun 8, 2021 00:26
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Switched to boss - it worked! It seems like the surface area of options for CAM is narrow, once you figure out how to get to everything. I'm learning this by experimenting, then referencing materials etc. Seemed daunting this morning; manageable now.
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Jun 8, 2021 00:27
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Dominoes posted:Follow-up: So far, it looks like my concerns about solidworks for making cuts in flat surfaces are valid. Has anyone used SW CAM in this context before? Ie it's trying to obliterate everything not part of the model. The 3d surfacing tools in SWCAM/CAMWorks really aren't the best thing to use if you want "just machine this shape, don't cut *everything*. You either want Boss, Corner Slot, Pocket, Open Profile or Curve Feature in the 2.5-axis Operations options. The 3d surfacing tools really need Contain Area sketches to function as-intended. Also adding support tabs to a Boss Feature is usually somewhere on the Contour tab, at the bottom right of that tab. Check the box for Tabs and then click the little gray box for options in the Tabs area to define how many/spacing/size of Tabs to leave around the feature. I still loving hate the CAM software for splitting the workflow across so many Tabs (& for making it impossible to edit instances in a hole pattern once it has been generated), mind you. But I use it *all the time* because work is stupid about the sunk cost fallacy and regular use means I'm getting better at working around its quirks. ...I miss MasterCAM though.
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Jun 8, 2021 02:22
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Ambrose Burnside posted:What are my options for adding organic/natural-looking textures to parts I'm designing, across SW, Rhino 6, and Aspire? I'm mostly looking to turn perfect-flat plane surfaces into something with a liiiiiiittle bit of roughness and height variability, without any visible tiling or repetition. Also interested in much fancier/more ornamental texturing, being able to simulate hammer-textured metal would rule, for example, but just being able to add some noise to a surface would be a great start. I kinda experimented with this recently, was making curtain pull knobs and googled 3d print knurling to try and find something. The easiest thing I came up with was to use the coil tool in fusion 3d to cut a spiral groove in the cylindrical part, but then I found out this slicer software called IdeaMaker has a texture feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ygdNQThAs The interface is pretty wonky but it does work
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Jun 8, 2021 15:24
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biracial bear for uncut posted:The 3d surfacing tools in SWCAM/CAMWorks really aren't the best thing to use if you want "just machine this shape, don't cut *everything*. Dominoes fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jun 13, 2021 |
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Jun 13, 2021 15:02
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Dominoes posted:I appreciate the info! This advice got me out of trouble after you posted it; it looks like "Curve Feature" is the best match. I got lost between this and the CNC threads. I thought I was missing something re not being able to edit features after creating them! Some more detailed rule of thumb about types of features to use for certain shapes are here. https://www.goengineer.com/blog/camworks-milling-features-and-allowable-operations
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Jun 13, 2021 15:45
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Wandering in here from the 3D printing thread If anyone wants to advertise 1:1 screenshare CAD lessons on SA Mart, specifically for filament 3D printing etc, I'd be interested Edit: I have some 3mm diameter carbon/carbon fiber rod that I need to build some butt adapters, and some servo mounts I want to build, nothing terribly complex but I just don't have 12 hours to watch a bunch of YouTube videos that may or may not tangentially be related to what I'm doing, either in fusion 360 or blender, probably Hadlock fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jun 17, 2021 |
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Jun 17, 2021 18:31
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If you need an adapter for 3mm in your... Oh. Wait.
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