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Assembly features and motion analysis lead the list of improvements. by Don LaCourse
Last September CADALYST Labs reviewed Solid Edge 7 from Unigraphics Solutions, Inc. Naturally, four months later, v8 appeared. Solid Edge 8 offers a few very nice new features on top of its older version. Please refer to my review in CADALYST, September 1999, on p. 32 to see where the product was just a short time ago. This time around I'll discuss some new features and other features that I didn't get to last year. As you know, Solid Edge 8 is a parametric feature-based solid modeling system based on the Parasolid modeling kernel. Its minimum requirements are still a Pentium PC, Windows 98/NT 4.0, 64MB RAM, 150MB free RAM, minimum resolution 1024 X 768 with 65,000 colors, and a CD-ROM drive.
Stay the course
These features stayed very much the same in Solid Edge 8. You can find more details in September's review, and you can see an updated feature chart at www.cadalyst.com/reviews. Sketching. You use sketching to create profiles that define features (figure 1). During feature commands, you select a face or datum plane to locate the profile, the sketch mode automatically activates, and a true view of the sketch plane displays in a separate window.
Surface and wire frame modeling. Solid Edge is not a hybrid solid/surface modeler-surface creation, use, and editing continues to be limited. Solid Edge tags surfaces and curves as construction geometry that it uses to define other features. It provides a basic set of surface commands for construction. Solid Edge, citing a lack of market demand, doesn't support surface and wire frame modeling in their conventional sense. You can't use curves and surfaces to define a part volume and join them to form a solid as in a hybrid solid/surface modeler. It also doesn't handle more complex functions such as multisided patches, curve mesh, trimmed surfaces, and surface through a cloud of points. It doesn't support a range of curve creation methods, and you can't use control points to edit surfaces.
Sheet-metal design. Solid Edge 8 contains sheet-metal part design (figure 2, p. 32) capabilities. As in the Part environment, a sheet-metal part consists of a base and subsequent features that you add to...