By this time, you’ve had a chance to get your hands on the newest version of SolidWorks – or at least, you’ve taken a look at our Explore SolidWorks 2014 website. It’s always fun to delve into all of the new bells and whistles that SolidWorks brings us, promising to make our engineering lives easier and more productive. With over 200 user-requested enhancements this year, it can be hard to know where to begin.
To help you target your efforts, we’re going to focus on our favorite enhancements of 2014 – and why we like them so much. We’ll concentrate on the SolidWorks CAD product in this blog. Similar articles on the new features in Simulation, Enterprise PDM, SolidWorks Electrical, and Composer will be showcased in future blog posts.
This is the 22nd major release of SolidWorks software – let’s turn our attention to one of the powerful new features and time-saving shortcuts which was a major theme driving the development of this version: Conic Fillets.
Conic Fillets
In consumer product design and other applications where aesthetics are important, constant and variable radius fillets have limited use due to the sharp change in curvature. Curvature continuous fillets provide smooth results, but are limited to a single, constant radius. Now, the fillet feature gives you more control to define a new shape… a constant or variable radius conic fillet.
First, the user interface has been enhanced to give you extra control (screen). A new pull-down menu lets you determine the shape of the fillet profile as a standard Circular fillet, Conic controlled by rho value, or Conic radius (minimum radius of curvature).
Wait, what? That’s right.
A new pull-down menu lets you determine the shape of the fillet profile as a standard Circular fillet, Conic controlled by rho value, or Conic radius (minimum radius of curvature).
The fact that this is possible with an applied feature instead of time-consuming surfacing operations will be welcome news for consumer product and industrial designers.
Things get very interesting when you combine it with a Variable Radius Fillet. You can define the fillet radius and the conic radius at any number of points along an edge!
Conic fillets can also be created using face fillets, which are especially useful if you need to fillet surfaces without a common edge.
The user interface has also changed to allow the width of the fillet to be controlled by two methods: Radial, which creates a regular, circular fillet, and Chord Width (previously called “Constant Width”). The profile can be either Circular or Curvature Continuous.
With the new Conic Fillet feature, SolidWorks 2014 provides a wider variety of point-and-click blending options that give you the control you need of your desired shape in addition to the more powerful Boundary Surface and Filled Surface.
Be sure to check back frequently for upcoming, in-depth articles on these great new features. Better yet – join a SolidWorks 2014 LIVE launch event near you!