Neri Oxman has a radical vision for the future of design and engineering.

Design by Algorithm, Design by Life

Oxman’s lab, the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab, is aimed at taking the world of design from a place where products aren’t assembled from smaller components, but rather grown, much in the same way that nature produces complex “products.”

But why?

Oxman believes that the Industrial Revolution’s assembly line model has become outmoded. The pollution it produces from unrecyclable materials, energy waste and more isn’t sustainable, so a new mode for manufacturing and design is required.

Central to Oxman’s idea is the notion that manufacturing should use solutions already developed in nature, like the production of melanin to protect from UV radiation, to improve production design.

But melanin is a complex chemical, created by an even more complex set of biological reactions, and manufacturing melanin today is an expensive task ($315/g, according to Oxman) not suited for modern modes of production.

So the solution to this problem is to build biological systems into materials by means of genetic engineering. Oxman calls this process “parametric chemistry,” and it’s one of the most intriguing aspects of her work.

Essentially, parametric chemistry is a method of carefully placing select chemistry within a product’s material where its chemical potential can be leveraged to affect the way a material behaves. In the case of a melanin-impregnated material, melanin would be grafted to a material in select locations so that when the material is acted on by UV radiation, the material could respond by producing a protective pigment that resists the damage of UV rays.

But how will these new biologically driven material designs be produced? Contemporary manufacturing methods can’t produce the type of radical design that Oxman envisions. A new method of manufacturing will have to be developed. And that brings us to…

Additive Manufacturing, a Crucial Element of Oxman’s Idea

For years, Oxman has been working closely with 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys to create methods for building biologically active materials via additive manufacturing. Amazingly, her work with additive manufacturing has been met with some great success.

Through the use of additive manufacturing, Oxman and her MIT team have been able to build biopolymer materials made from chitin and other naturally manufactured bits with substances like melanin to create “living materials” that respond to their environment.

A 3D-printed sample of a material built using parametric chemistry. This sample includes reactive melanin that will darken as it comes into contact with damaging UV rays.

The reason that additive manufacturing is so critical to Oxman’s vision for design is that it gives engineers the ability to create complex materials that aren’t chemically homogenous by building a form layer by layer. This layer-by-layer approach makes it possible for designers to engineer their materials to have distinct qualities throughout their structure, something that’s seen frequently in nature. The process works like this: A 3D printer is loaded with a base material, say chitin and other substances, as well as a melanin-producing biomaterial. As the print begins, the chitin cocktail is laid down layer by layer as instructed by the engineer who built the material. Once the printer reaches a place in the material that requires melanin, the printer switches materials and adds the melanin where it’s needed. What’s more, the printer is not only creating a new material, but it’s also creating the form of whatever product is being built, making it an interesting analog for the way that biological structures are formed.

Unfortunately, this same process can’t be done as precisely with modern mass manufacturing technologies, so Oxman’s team has embraced additive manufacturing as the most viable means for experimental materials and product design. Given her team’s success with additive manufacturing, Oxman posits an idea that should begin being considered by engineering and design teams that want to stay at the forefront of innovation.

Additive manufacturing will be crucial to the development of biologically inspired material design made possible by parametric chemistry.

The Relevance of Oxman’sWork

While additive manufacturing, let alone parametric chemistry, is still a fledgling field, it’s become increasingly clear that advances in its mass manufacturing performance and additive manufacturing material libraries are occurring at an accelerated rate. The same can also be said for computational design, where generative algorithms are pushing innovation to nearly unimaginable extremes. However, these technologies have not yet reached maturity.

And there’s the rub.

Oxman’s work exists in place where both of these technologies have already reached maturity. That’s too say, Oxman’s work is both futurist and aspirational and is relevant to today’s engineers because it points the way to a possible design future. But before that future arrives, a number of issues have to be resolved.

One question that remains with Oxman’s work is the hidden conceit that bioinspired, computational design can offer limitless and unique solutions to design challenges. While the constraints of a design challenge vary from project to project, and nature seems to have an ingenious solution for every design challenge, one has to wonder if a standard computational design tool kit of algorithms will lead to a proliferation of biologically inspired, yet nearly identical, products that cease to be unique in appearance and function.

The answer may be “no,” provided the engineers in charge are sophisticated programmers who can retool an already established algorithm, or build one from scratch. Maybe the answer remains “no” if engineering teams engaged in this type of avant-garde design attempt to employ AI to create new models for design optimization.

But since that future hasn’t arrived, another question still lingers for me: Will this radical vision for design be transformed into a mass-manufacturing paradigm that eventually wears the wonder from these unique forms? Will additive manufacturing really make short-run, unique and bespoke products a viable means of putting products in a customer’s hands? Can nature provide a more sustainable mode for producing complex goods?

The answer to these questions are still unknown, but from all appearances, it seems that Oxman is at a critical nexus for answering these questions. What’s more, her insights into design may be propelling engineering towards an exciting new future.

Regardless of all of those requirements, designers and engineers have to get the job done, and we have to get the job done fast in order to help our company succeed in producing new and innovative products. SOLIDWORKS has some great tools to help with these. Let’s go over a few.

First off, let’s start with selecting material and gauge. The gauge table tool (see Figure 1) should be used as much as possible. It is located in C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS\lang\english\Sheet Metal Gauge Tables. I personally use the K-factor version, but many may prefer bend allowance or go with a bend table. Both can be found in a nearby folder.

Properly formatting the list of gauges is important. It must be done from thinnest to largest, and there can’t be duplicate thickness. One may have to create a few of these files to fully utilize the entire catalog of a company. But once it is done and in place, it makes life easier for everyone in the company, especially if they all work off the same controlled file set. This setup builds consistency and accuracy out on the shop floor, which means less headaches for the designer.

Figure 1.  Filling this out with the help of your shop team really makes life easier. (All images courtesy of the author.)

Next, let’s look at the basics of creating a sheet metal design. There are many ways of doing this.

Base Flange/Tab

A common favorite is sketching out the profile and using the Base Flange/Tab tool (see Figure 2) that is usually located first on the Sheet Metal ribbon. Drawing a simple profile and using the Base Flange/Tab tool will open up the options that can be used. To use the gauge tables that were discussed earlier, one must check the “Use gauge table” box that opens up all selectable shop-approved gauges with their corresponding radii and the K-factor (or bend allowance), so that there is no worry of forgetting or mistyping anything. At any stage, these parameters can be overridden with drop downs and checkboxes that will correspond with input boxes to adjust for special cases. Not shown (scroll down in Property Manager) is an auto relief setting that controls how corners and relief cuts are handled.

Figure 2. Options in basic Sheet Metal Base Flange/Tab.

This same tool can be used to make a flat piece of sheet metal that one would use to add edge flanges and other useful sheet metal features.

Edge Flanges

Edge Flange (see Figure 3) can be used to add an attached wall to any sheet metal body. This flange will inherit the radius and thickness parameters of the base flange. Of course, these can be overwritten if required. Designers can even select multiple edges that can be adjacent (by creating a mitered edge between the two) or located anywhere else on the same sheet metal body during this one operation. Designers can select flange positions that can move the flange location to the inside, outside, offset or to other less commonly used options that should be explored at your leisure.

One thing that often gets missed in the Edge Flange option is the ability to edit the flange profile. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a rectangle. It can be any shape that is required as long as it is a closed profile that connects to the original edge. Some small rules apply here that most designers will figure out quickly.

Figure 3. Edge Flange with profile adjusted.

Another thing that I would like to point out on the Edge Flange is the ability to change the angle to match another surface. This comes in handy when trying to match up awkward angles. There are some rules to this as well but, once learned, it does become invaluable in tricky spots. The result is usually very appealing and is difficult for many other CAD programs to execute. SOLIDWORKS users are lucky to have this feature. Designers should get to know it before they have to try too many workarounds.

The last thing I will touch on for the Edge Flange function is that designers should be encouraged to use a relatively new tool called the “Up to Edge and Merge” option that is located in the Flange Length dropdown. The main purpose of this is that if there are two (3D) parallel flanges that are not part of the same body (it can be the same body, but this process is rarely practical), you can use this tool to create a connecting flange between the two and create one sheet metal body. This is a good trick to keep in your back pocket.

Convert to Sheet Metal

This is a very helpful tool, especially for concept and prototype work. Basically, designers can build a bunch of flat-sided boxes with flat or curved sections. The designer can then select one face and add adjacent edges (within reason) to create a quick parametric sheet metal part. All the previously mentioned controls are available to the designer. The Split Line command (in the Surfaces ribbon), or inserting holes and cuts, can be used to control profiles of each side prior to the Convert to Sheet Metal function (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Convert to sheet metal, with split line to control one flange.

As shown in Figure 4, the checkbox for “Keep body” has been enabled in order to reuse the same body in case the bottom and back side need to be utilized for a multibody sheet metal design.

Multi-body Sheet Metal

Designers are not limited to only one sheet metal part per file. One part can be used for a combination of mutliple sheet metal bodies, CNC parts and weldment parts. This is very smilar to how an assembly would be constructed. This is a huge timesaver in prototype design and can be used for production if configurations and design tables are used with careful strategy. The possibilities are nearly limitless but could require some well thought out and disciplined processes for this workflow to work.

Unfold and Fold

The Unfold and Fold comands are very powerful tools. One often needs to add fillets to miter corners in order to gain extra clearance during the manufacturing process—or to accomplish something that can’t be more easily done in the folded view. All the designer has to do is to select the Unfold option from the sheet metal ribbon, select a face that will be stationary and click the “Collect All Bends” option.

The part should unfold if it is made of sheet metal features and has a uniform thickness. After this operation, the designer should realize that this part is not manufacturable because of the two flanges that are highlighted (see Figure 5). In this case, a correction would need to be made. This correction can be achieved by first using the Convert to Sheet Metal function and then by adding a replacement flange to a new body (see Figure 6).

Figure 5. Unfolded sheet metal, before correction.

Figure 6. Folded sheet metal, with bottom added, after correction.

There are many other tools that can be used with this software. Miter Flange, Lofted-Bend, corner controls, Sheet Metal Gusset and Rip are all very common tools that can make life easier for the designer.

These tools are valuable for different aspects of design, and all of them are very user-friendly once the designer is aquainted with them.

About the Author

Ryan Reid is a CAD administrator, PLM enthusiast, designer, GD&T specialist, lead, lean philosophy supporter, Microsoft Office expert, 3D printing hobbyist and manufacturing-focused professional with 17 years of combined experience in those areas. Reid has accomplishments in all aspects of manufacturing engineering, from cradle to grave plastics/mold to structural, systems, process and change management design.

Let’s face it. The Internet of Things (IoT) can be a distracting place. Phones, tablets, computers are sucking our attention enough as it is. Do we really need smart devices on the IoT grabbing even more of our attention?

Yves Béhar, founder of the Fuseproject and world-famous industrial designer, doesn’t think so. At SOLIDWORKS World 2016, the award-winning product visionary said, “There’s a huge conflict between our tech tools and living in the moment. Our screens have become giant attention-sucking monsters. We’ve become prisoners of our displays and phones.”

Béhar has a big problem with the so-called “distraction hell” being created with current IoT designs. He suggests that engineers and product developers should aim for a more invisible interface. Something so natural and instinctive that you don’t even realize it’s there until you need it.

“People confuse using the phone with being distracted and not in the moment,” said Béhar. “We all experience the social tension caused by the screens and displays that control the information we can’t live without. The alternative is to think about how that information can be transmitted in subtle and invisible ways. As humans, we have five senses—so why are we just focused on sight and screens to comprehend the signals that technology sends us?”

This idea might sound crazy, but think about it. Béhar argues that humans experience invisible interfaces constantly when interacting with nature. Who needs a weatherman when you can step outside, look at the sky, feel the temperature and moisture on your skin? The goal is to mimic these subtle cues to drive the future of IoT devices.

“IoT need to be discreet, to disappear and be a part of the way we wear or live with something—which is a really big challenge,” explained Béhar. “Technology was never a field that was easy for everyone to get into, it wasn’t discreet or the background with invisible signals and pretty designs integrated into fashion. This has been a big shift in the past few years.”

The Importance of Industrial Design to Advance IoT Technology

To bring these subtle notifications into our IoT devices, Béhar noted that we need to pay attention to industrial design early in the development cycle.

“I think back to when designers were called in last-minute to make something look pretty. It’s completely impossible to think of a good user experience that late in the design cycle,” expressed Béhar. “If you don’t have the user experience and design at the forefront you won’t be able to catch up at the end. You can’t just redesign at the end of the process.”

At SOLIDWORKS World 2016, Béhar jokes about how ignoring design in favor of technology led to Microsoft’s initial failed attempts at creating a tablet computer. Apple, however, took the idea and made it marketable.

To demonstrate why design is so important to technology, Béhar compared the failure of the early Microsoft tablets to the success of Apple’s iPad years later.

“In the mid-90s, Silicon Valley did not think design was important. Technology was mostly in enterprises and hidden from view. It wasn’t something people were using in their everyday lives,” joked Béhar. “Of course, Microsoft has done a lot of work on design lately so this is a slightly older slide but it still works.”

This is a great lesson for IoT designers to pay attention to. After all, a classic complaint made against Apple is that the company repackages inventions and innovations of others into more marketable products. But who is really to blame here? The company that made the innovation and couldn’t design it to sell? Or the company that picked up the bright idea and made millions off of a sleek design?

“Technology today is commoditized. It’s not about specs anymore. Instead it’s really about the experience,” argued Béhar. “Technology is the raw feature before design gets to it. When design gets hold of that raw feature, what we do with it to shape and mold it to our needs and lives is the job.”

Data Collection Lessons from a Smart Device that Predates the IoT

Designing subtlety into an IoT products is a challenge but it isn’t impossible once you get your head out of the box.

Béhar’s Learning Shoe was one of the first smart connected devices before the IoT was a concept.

Forget about onboard displays or phone apps. Think about how we need to interact with the product. Think about how you can make it look and feel like the traditional product.

Béhar noted the subtlety in one of his earliest smart devices, the Learning Shoe. The shoe collected data about how a user walked. Their pronation, weight and heart rate were all recorded.

The data was collected in an attempt to change the relationship between the user and the shoe maker. Béhar said, “I wanted that relationship to be continuous. I didn’t want it to be about a single product that I purchased for one season. It should be a product made smarter. It should give people a reason to go back to the manufacturer. I was interested in a customized fit and how the product is designed and made just for me.”

The challenge at the time was how to transfer the data to the manufacturer so they could make the custom shoe. When Béhar worked on this shoe, it was before the widespread use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the IoT. But was this an advantage in disguise?

“Back then the data was collected on a chip and the chip was removed and then the shoe recycled and a better shoe made from this data,” explained Béhar.

The point is that the users and the designers were not inundated with data as the tests were being conducted. The user just continued on their routine, walking around. The data wasn’t transferred or even considered important until the moment it was needed.

Béhar’s Learning Shoe collects data discretely.

Though this custom-made shoe didn’t take off, it sparked Béhar’s interest in the idea of making technology more discreet, wearable, fashionable and personal. And given the wearable trends of the IoT industry, he wasn’t the only one interested.

Using Camouflage to Hide an IoT Interface Until It is Needed

Some IoT devices are not just about collecting data. At times, users will also need to give some IoT devices feedback and instructions.

However, having this interface constantly available will naturally steal the user’s attention—even when that attention isn’t needed. The best strategy is to hide the interface until the user chooses to interact with it.

hive thermostat blends into its surrounding by hiding its interface in a mirror when not in use.

Béhar noted that an IoT device he worked on that used this strategy was the hive thermostat. The device uses camouflage to blend into the home environment by hiding the user interface behind a one-way mirror coating. The interface will then come to life as soon as the user needs it.

This device is unique in that it doesn’t attempt to distract people from the world around them. In fact, it reflects that world as a means of hiding from the user.

“As IoT products enter our homes they have to be designed with the home in mind; an environment where you don’t want distraction and you don’t want complexity,” said Béhar. “[Design] isn’t just about making things pretty or work. It’s about shifting our perception of the world and making new experiences by pushing the limits of what’s possible.”

What if You Don’t Realize an IoT Design Interface is Even There?

Contrary to popular belief, not every IoT device needs a visual interface after the initial installations or even for the odd tweaks and troubleshooting. Some devices work best when you forget they are even there. They just do their job.

August smart lock gives users subtle clues as to the status of the locking mechanism.

Béhar notes that one such example he worked on is the August smart lock. This tiny little robot fits into your door and unlocks itself when it recognizes the phone in your pocket. The user just walks up to the door and feels a vibration from the phone signaling that the door is now unlocked.

Though the user can add chimes and lights to help add cues to express the status of the lock, these are not necessary. The user just needs to toss out their clunky keys, walk to the door and open the door as if the lock isn’t even there.

“Imagine if this level of attention to user experience, design and brands went into everything: your car, appliances, the things we interact with every day,” said Béhar. “It would transform technology from being something that needs to be learned to something that integrates seamlessly into our lives.”

“Technology in the home is typically installed by a ‘tech person’ and then everyone else hates it,” Béhar added. “When you install something in the home everyone has to love it or it will fail. If only one person knows how to use it or get it into the home, you’re in trouble so it’s a different bar to reach compared to a computer or a single-use tech product.”

To read about the industrial IoT (IIoT), click here. To learn about designing an IoT device that makes beer, click here.

About the Author

Shawn Wasserman (@ShawnWasserman) is the Internet of Things (IoT) and Simulation Editor at ENGINEERING.com. He is passionate about ensuring engineers make the right decisions when using computer-aided engineering (CAE) software and IoT development tools. Shawn has a Masters in Bio-Engineering from the University of Guelph and a BASc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

A Design 40 years in the making: Yves Behar's SAYL chair for Herman Miller.

Chairs are all around us. They carve out space in our homes, they’re a part of the structure of our workplaces and they’re even important in recreation. Without overstating it, the sheer ubiquity of chairs is astounding. But what makes these objects so daunting to designers is that for each situation, for each environment, chairs have to blend function and aesthetics more seamlessly than most other objects.

Just think about it.

When a chair is empty, it has to be beautiful, effortlessly fitting into the scheme of a space. When a chair is occupied, it has to be comfortable, ergonomic and customizable. What’s more, it often has to be both practical and economical.

Needless to say, those are distinctly difficult design constraints to overcome.

The Origins of the Task Chair

Over the years, designers with pedigrees like Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid have attempted to create successful seating solutions. But no matter how well any chair design is received, it seems to always be broken by the unending pressure of people’s changing habits. Nowhere is the pressure of those habits greater than in the workplace, where a certain type of chair, the task chair, has ruled supreme.

But what’s a task chair?

Put simply, a task chair is a seating technology that makes it easier for a desk worker to access the furniture, files and paraphernalia required to do their task. One of the most common characteristics of task chairs is their set of wheels and the ability to swivel. But if you think that task chairs must be a 20th-century invention, you'd be wrong. Task chairs aren’t new. In fact, they’ve been around since the mid-19th century when it was rumored that Charles Darwin invented the very first task chair by attaching wheels to the legs of his chair so that he could reach his specimens with greater ease.

Since Darwin’s time, the task chair has evolved, and one of the biggest factors shaping task chair design has been the changing nature of work.

Over the last half century, the U.S. economy has changed dramatically. The United States has shifted from being an industrial giant to one driven by services and information. With these shifts, people have changed the way they work in an office, and offices themselves have adopted new configurations. Not surprisingly, office furniture has changed to match these new environments.

At one time, executives sat behind powerful, heavy thrones, while work-a-day employees toiled away in squeaky padded chairs. Those standards changed over the years, and different furniture rolled in and out. No furniture solution seemed to stick.

But then something happened. Designers started to think about the seats they were creating. They began to wonder, could their designs support a more comfortable workplace existence? Alhough this idea made designing a chair more difficult, it created an opportunity where a chair could be built that would satisfy the needs of an office in constant flux.

Though it took decades of design work to find a solution, one chair seemed to have broken the spell that doomed earlier seating designs.

You might even know it by name.

The Chair That Would Be a Standard

An Aeron chair, the would-be king of seating.

In 1994, Herman Miller introduced the Aeron chair, and almost overnight, the consensus view of what a task chair had to do changed.

The Aeron chair’s debut came at an auspicious time. Silicon Valley was taking off, and tech firms bubbled over with young, smart, ambitious engineers who looked at the office differently. For many of these people, working in front of a desk with a rigid chair at their back just wasn’t going to work. Armed with laptops and a tendency to slouch or assume postures unfamiliar to traditional offices, the Aeron chair offered an adjustable back, arms, lumbar support and other options that made odd postures comfortable.

In addition to its adaptability, the Aeron chair was made to be one of the most environmentally friendly task chairs ever built. In fact, 94 percent of every Aeron chair can be recycled, making it cheaper to retire than almost any other task chair ever built.

To say that the Aeron chair served its users well is an understatement. Within a few years of its debut, Aerons were everywhere, and Herman Miller was producing one every 17 seconds to keep up with demand. But that demand wasn’t generated by accident; it took years of development including materials research, ergonomics assessments, tortuous load tests and dozens of mechanical design reviews.

Throughout a multi-year design process, the Aeron chair’s engineers, lead by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf, faced showdowns with Herman Miller’s management, multiple prototype redesigns and other obstacles that come part and parcel with designing something as versatile as a task chair.

Although the Aeron chair continues to be a mainstay in offices across the globe, more modern competitors have started to sneak up on the venerable piece of technology, attempting to threaten its seat as king of the task chairs. For these new task chair models, the ideas of a static working posture has driven their design, and it appears that the notions of mobility and technology are only pushing seating into new realms.

Even though its golden age has ended, with nearly a quarter century of faithful service, the Aeron came as close to being a perfect task chair design as any other seat had in the past.

The Future of Sitting

Today, the idea of sitting for extended periods in a task chair has not only become passé, it’s also come under scrutiny. In 2014, a media storm about the dangers of sitting reached a fever pitch with some outlets touting that “sitting is the new smoking.”

With those currents driving the fashions of today’s workplaces, task chairs are likely to face a new era of redesigns that will likely be as difficult as the last. With people looking to recline more in relaxed offices and mobile technology such as tablets and smartphones replacing laptops and desktops, future task chairs may take on radically different forms than they have in the past.

So, why's a task chair so difficult to design?

The answer has to be that people are ever evolving, and the ways we interact are evolving too. Because chairs are critical tools that help define how and where we work, finding the right balance of aesthetics and function becomes an intimate game of blending engineering with prescience.

That seems like a really difficult task.

About the Author

Kyle Maxey is a mechanical designer and writer from Austin, TX. He earned a degree in Film at Bard College and has since studied Mechanical and Architectural drafting at Austin Community College. As a designer Kyle has had vast experience with CAD software and rapid prototyping. One day he dreams of becoming a toy designer.

There are many ways to arrive at your ideal design destination. You can do everything on a napkin sketch. Easy to do and valuable for initial concept work, but not very versatile or informative. (You can’t really measure it accurately.) You can build your design with surfaces. This is somewhat tedious because you generally must build one face of the model at a time, trimming and manipulating as you go. You can create any shape you can imagine (given enough time and practice). But a surface model defines only surfaces, so it is hollow.

Or you can use solid modeling. Solids have many benefits, but there are inherent limitations there, too. They are really great at capturing manufacturing data (like mass, weight, etc.) but they can also be fairly restrictive in what you can create. Often your models will appear somewhat boxy and dull. The best way to use SOLIDWORKS is to use surfaces and solids to achieve truly marvelous models. You have a box of tools; use them wisely. Solid modeling is really, really good at getting a lot done, quickly. Surface modeling produces super-high-quality models, but can take time. Use both methods to achieve great models, fast, and with greater flexibility.

The Sketch

Figure 1. Extruding gives you control of your model from one end to the other.

Figure 2. Revolving gives you greater versatility to shape your model, but its basic shape will always be cylindrical.

Whether surface or solid, your SOLIDWORKS models will begin with a sketch. You must really think about the overall shape you wish your model to achieve. Reduce it to its most basic shape—the lowest common denominator. That’s what you start with. For instance, a mighty space rocket is, at its heart, a cylinder. The next decision is a little more daunting. Should you extrude the cylinder or revolve it? This is very important to decide. If you extrude it, you can control the diameter and height as well as the shape perpendicular to the direction of the extrusion (see Figure 1). If you revolve it, you can control the diameter, height and axial shape (see Figure 2). Neither tool is superior to the other as both find their value in their application.

Figure 3. A sketch is normally two dimensional, occupying a plane of the X and Y axes.

Figure 4. A 3D sketch occupies space, with parameters along the X and Y as well as the Z axes.

The sketch is usually planar or in other words, flat or 2D (see Figure 3). This type of sketch is easiest to make and control. But for sketches that cannot be confined to a plane, SOLIDWORKS also offers 3D sketches (see Figure 4). Both have advantages and both have limitations.

The Surface

Figure 5. A boundary surface can have any kind or number of sides, but its edges must form a fully-closed boundary.

Figure 6. A lofted surface uses its sketches to establish its shape.

There are basic surfaces, such as boundary and loft. These are very powerful. A boundary surface uses curves that fully enclose a single shape: say, a rectangle or an octagon. You can either use a single sketch or a combination of multiple sketches to describe a closed boundary—hence the name. (That doesn’t mean it has to be 2D either.) Each of the bounding entities can dance all around, just as long as their ends coincide with the ends of another sketch to make a closed loop (see Figure 5). A lofted surface usually, but not necessarily, uses multiple parallel sketches to build a shape. Picture the rafters in a house, or the ribs of a skeleton. Each sketch represents a shape the surface will be stretched across, thus describing the model’s shape (see Figure 6).

Figure 7. You can use the Deform command to add grip features.

Once you have your surface, or, in this case, a sweep, you can use various techniques to tweak it into just the right shape. First, identify your profile sketch, then the sweep path. That gives you the basic shape. Now, select Deform. There are various options available to you. One of the most powerful (and easiest to use) is the Curve To Curve option. It works much like “go from here to there.” Choose as your Initial Curves the sketch representing the current geometry. Then, click in the Target Curves box and select the sketch that represents the geometry you want. Last, choose the geometry you wish deformed. Deform will alter the geometry to match (see Figure 7).

Figure 8. After you are done modeling your features, you can knit them together to form a solid body.

You have many options within Curve To Curve. You can fix edges and/or curves so they don’t move during the Deform. You can adjust the accuracy of the shape so that it exactly matches the curves you specified. When you are done, if you so choose, you can knit your surfaces into one surface. If you have created a completely enclosed volume, SOLIDWORKS will recognize it as a solid body (see Figure 8).

Once you have mastered a few simple surface types and how to use them, your models will begin to take on new and more interesting shapes. Form versus function? No. Form is function. How something is used dictates its most optimal shape. And with the right tools, any shape is possible. That’s what makes SOLIDWORKS so powerful—and fun! So, don’t just be a surface modeler or a solid modeler. Be a modeler and explore all the tools that you have. See what they’ll do and discover when you might want to use them. Then, you’ll be prepared to not only take on the big jobs, but also excel!

More information on advanced surface design can be found here.

About the Author

Michael Hudspeth has been a designer for two decades, a lifelong artist, an avid model builder and author (specializing in science fiction). He, his wife, two daughters and one too many cats thrive in the great American heartland, just outside of St. Louis, Missouri.