Appliance Design - September 2008 - (Page 57) SOFTWARE Portion of SpaceClaim toolbar showing intuitive modeling capabilities. another. Experienced CAD users can choose to use the same system’s history-based rules in different ways, producing models that are incomprehensible to other experienced users. Depending on the design challenge, CAD operators must choose the appropriate approach from a list of modeling techniques and practices: Top-down versus bottomup: Whether the design is an assembly of loosely connected components or highly structured and interrelated. Horizontal versus vertical relationship structure: Whether parent-child relationships should be driven from sibling layout components or from parent components in the design structure. Feature order: How features should be sorted in the history tree. For example, whether rounds are ordered before drafts or vice-versa. Component hierarchy: Whether to design assemblies using multi-body parts or use an assembly structure that reflects the bill of materials (BOM). Highly-constrained versus weakly-constrained models: Whether every degree of freedom should be pinned down or only the known relationships should be constrained. 2D versus 3D: Whether to take advantage of the simplicity of 2D or to invest the extra effort to create accurate 3D models. While there is no right or wrong approach, everyone on the detailed design team must use the same practices to minimize modeling complications. Given the intellectual complexity, only dedicated CAD operators can effectively work with the CAD models. All history-based CAD systems have different architectures, which prevents CAD systems from effectively interoperating. CAD vendors www.applianceDESIGN.com AD02084CF.indd 1 applianceDESIGN September 2008 57 1/15/08 10:59:16 AM http://www.caereports.com http://www.appliancedesign.com
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