Housekeeping

00:00

In this final video of the solid modeling basics with Shapr, I was going to go over a bunch of industry practices and best practices for CAD modeling and to make sure that your designs stay consistent and improve your overall workflow. So the first one that I wanted to talk about was to just stay organized. As we started building these things, you can see on the left-hand side, we have all these items.

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And on the right hand side, we have all these history. All of these things are related to the model in some way. So certainly getting rid of things that don't have anything in them. So for example, this folder doesn't have any information in it. So we're just going to delete that because it's not particularly useful. Then when we look at individual things like sketches, for example, those things relate to individual components. So for example, these sketches here

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the development of the water pick head so I might select all of these and put them in the folder like that Additionally, I might go through and if there's an important sketch I Could add a name into it. So for example in sketch one, you know, this is our base sketch for the water pick head So I might rename this to say water pick head

01:23

Likewise, in the history tree, there's lots of operations here that define, you know, what happens in the overall development of this form. And it might be useful to come in here and also rename some of these. So for example, our last Boolean operation was really to combine these two bodies together. And so I might come in here and rename this and just say...

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waterpick body. So staying organized, being able to chunk parts of the file together and be able to look at them and keep things organized is particularly useful. Another example is this body here is actually the waterpick head itself. So we could put this inside of the waterpick head folder. Additionally, you know, we have a lot of sketches that we use to build the

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the body itself and so we can put all of those in a separate folder. So I'm going to select all of these. I'm going to include this and we're going to add this folder in like that.

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So there's lots of ways to stay organized.

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This body here doesn't look like we're using it for anything. So it would be useful to delete that and we can clean up our overall history. Um, that does pop up in our feature tree. So that's just something to keep in mind is to just stay organized early and often. Another really useful tip here is to try to fully constrain your sketches. When we were building this body, for example, we ended up moving kind of fast and I didn't take a lot of time to measure and

03:15

be very precise. But the thing that we can do is if I come in here and I go back to our insert a break point, we can go back to our initial sketch for these for these guide curves. Right. As soon as I start moving these guide curves around, it's kind of lost as to what what's actually happening. So the thing I can do is come in here and actually start to build scaffolding that has very specific dimensions. So for example, I know that we have some other sketches that are

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relevant to this, I'm going to turn those on. But then I can also come in and start to build additional geometry. So for this point here, it's kind of floating out in space. So I'm going to start building construction lines. I'm going to build lines that I can reference and put dimensions in. So now I can be more precise and very specific on where things move around to. And when I come out of the breakpoint,

04:11

than my whole model updates. Relating to that, I'd say to try to keep sketches focusing on one view. So all the features that are being created that are relevant to one another are in the same sketch. And so that way you can continuously reference them. So for example, if I wanted to focus on getting into this sketch again.

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I know that the top section that we use to make the body is referencing also the same sketches on the side. So even though we made two separate bodies, we use the same sketches in order to make those and that just helps things stay consistent. Conversely to that, try to also not make your sketches overly complicated. You want to keep the things in the sketches relevant to those elements and you want to keep them relatively simple so that they are usable.

05:05

For example, in the water pick, a lot of this could have been done with a simple revolve, and we chose to do it in a few steps, so there's a couple more sketches. But this, for the majority of this section, it's all cylindrical, so we could have just done one big revolve, and I can come in here and look at that sketch specifically. And even though we did do a couple of operations, we did end up...

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doing a lot of the sketching in one sketch.

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Again, this might be a great place to come in, rename it, and say, this is the tone drawing.

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That way we know which sketch goes where. And the nice thing is that when you update it in the history, it also updates in the item panel. One of the things that we did do in this cone drawing, for example, is we did think a little bit about how this part was going to be manufactured. So that informed a lot of how we were sketching things out. It also informed on how we did various operations. So for example, we did add a little bit of a taper to this orifice that goes all the way through the spout.

06:24

And we also tried to clean up the inside of this shape here with fillets and in order to make that manufacturable. The other thing to really think about is then the editability of the sketches themselves. So for example, there's this detent right here that is supposed to engage with another component. And we didn't have any real specific information about that detent. But the thing that we can do very quickly is we can come into this sketch and we can start to change.

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components and it'll automatically update. So really thinking through how do I lay out a sketch, how do I lay out dimensions and constraints so that I can maximize the editability when I need to come in and change something. How easy is that to do and does my sketch or my body break as a result of changing those dimensions. A big thing to focus on in sketching is to try to model from a very generic standpoint. So we're laying out major dimensions.

07:21

We're laying out components and things like that, but then getting into the details afterwards. So even with this relatively simple piece, we were building the overall components and then we were going in and detailing individual components and we didn't get too bogged down into the details early on. That is something that will also improve editability. One of the big things that I didn't really talk about was doing filleting and chamfering and a lot of those sort of higher level details at the end.

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don't do them at the beginning. So that way we're not trying to base sketches off of those fine details, which often change around. As soon as those fillets or those chamfers move around, then our sketches tend to break down. So the benefit of starting early with a big sketch like this, sketch number three, or rather the cone drawing, we could build this overall cone drawing. We could look at the

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the base sketch here. And because this base sketch was the overall dimension and not really focused on where the fillets were or anything like that, we could then build later sketches off of it that are going to be very robust. So they're not going to break down when you start to add fillets and when you start to add chamfers to the overall design. As things progress and as models get more complicated, one of the challenges you're going to run into is that as you start to move history elements around or start to design things or change things around, you're going to have

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some breakage. You're going to have some of the elements start to error out as a result of moving things beyond what that original editability intended. So for example, if I start to move these

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For example, this fillet here was done purposefully before these other two fillets in order to ensure that we were going to get a clean design. If I move this around and I change the order, you might see that things break down. So these two fillets no longer render properly and they become problematic. So I can turn that body back on. You can see that we're not getting very good effects. So one of the things to think about is really the order of operations and how can we best

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present those things so that way we can edit them and we can move them around without breaking down. If you're working in a company environment and you're working with other engineers, there's usually some standards associated with modeling. So one of the things to be aware of and get good at is to really understand how the company and how other engineers you work with are also editing models.

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And that goes with your own projects as well. As you start to develop those forms, having some consistency on how you build features and how you put them into the software is gonna help you stay organized. It's also gonna help people that come along and look at your model and try to edit it be a little bit more understanding of how you were working.

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All in all, one of the things that is going to come up over and over again is that as you develop more complex assemblies, complex features, you're going to find simpler ways of designing something. And so going back, editing pieces, remaking those pieces and really focusing on minimizing the amount of clutter in your history and item panel is going to be really key to being successful at using Shapr3D.