SolidWorks 2010 Bible

CHAPTER

Working with

Surfaces

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding surfacing

functions

Learning surfacing terminology

Exploring surface tools

Applying surfacing techniques

Working with surfaces tutorial

W

ith surface modeling you build a shape face by face. Faces made
by surface features can be knit together to enclose a volume,
which can become a solid. With solid modeling, you build all the
faces to make the volume at the same time. In fact, solid modeling is really
just highly automated surface modeling. Obviously there is more detail to it
than that, but this definition will get you started.

You can drive a car without knowing how the engine works, but you cannot
get the most power possible out of the car by only pressing harder on the gas
pedal; you have to get under the hood and make adjustments. In a way, that
is what working with surfaces is really all about — getting under the hood
and tinkering with the underlying functionality.

The goal of most surface modeling is to finish with a solid. Some surface fea-
tures make faces that will become faces of the solid, and some surface fea-
tures only act as reference geometry. Surface modeling is inherently
multi-body modeling because most surface features do not merge bodies
automatically.

Introducing Surfaces

In the end, you may never really need surfaces. It is possible to perform
workarounds using solids to do most of the things that most users need to
do. However, many of these workarounds are inefficient, cumbersome, and
raise as many difficulties as they solve. Although you may not view some of
the typical things you now do as inefficient and cumbersome, once you see
the alternatives, you may change your mind. The goal for this chapter is to