Many IDers are not familiar with the surfacing in SOLIDWORKS. It might be handy to go through a simple product like a mouse to walk through how you might go about modelling in solidworks. Over the next few days I will go over how to go about doing this in Solidworks.
I sketched this concept over lunch so the design might change over the next few days hehee Hopefully we will have a helpful series
Here are some approaches that we can possibly take. Approach 1 has the disadvantage of having a degenerate point where all the isoparms come together. This can make the surface quality difficult to control. We will probably have a hybrid of Approach 2 & 3 taken to another level
Over the next few days, I will try and break down how to make this mouse. It is composed of surfaces that are later knit, shelled and split into various components. This kind of method is what is referred to as a "top down" assembly. The actual construction method turned out to be a variant of Approach 2. My sketch shows a crease in the mouse. I decided not to model it because first it would have taken a little longer to think through and explain and second-it wasnt looking all that good .
The following part deals with inserting backgound bitmaps to use as underlays. Also the curve formed at the interface of the red part and the grey plastic is important. So we will define the character line by means of a 3D curve (3D sketch).
Solidworks uses flat planes called construction planes to create flat curves (2D sketch). These curves are then used to create geometry. The default construction planes are the Right, Front and Top plane. Designers used to Rhino and Alias can be confused by the construction planes. The default constuction planes are not actually views. Refer to Solidworks documentation to learn more to pan, zoom and dolly the camera.
Inserting Background Sketches:
1) Click Right plane.
2) Insert >Sketch, to start a sketch on the Right plane
3) Within the sketch Insert>icture to insert a background sketch. Insert a cropped view of the mouse in the right hand view. I used Photosop to crop out the different views. It is useful to crop each view as close to the bounding envelope as possible.
4) Draw a line that passes through the origin, and dimension the line to 120 mm. This line will be used as a reference to scale the background bitmap
5) Double click the bitmap. Drag handles will appear that will allow you to scale the jpeg to the 120 mm construction line. position the highest point of the sketch over the sketch origin by dragging and dropping
In addition to 2D sketches, SWX allows you to create 3D sketches. which are splines with control points that can move in three axes. They are very useful to define character lines/ bone lines of a product.
1)insert>3DSketch
2)in the right view use the spline tool to trace over the bitmap. It defualts to create a flat curve in the Right Plane.
Similar to Rhino and Alias you can move the control points in the Top View to match the bitmap. (Hint: Hit Spacebar to get default views like left , right , top etc