Thursday 4 December 2008

Negative numbers in SolidWorks 2009

SolidWorks 2009 allows you to enter negative and zero values for sketch dimensions. This is fantastic news for DriveWorksXpress users because these values can also be driven.

Imagine a cut out on a face centred about a plane. This cut out could cut through the edge of the face, or be positioned anywhere on the face. To achieve this In SolidWorks 2008 some reference geometry was needed to be created away from the edge so the dimension to the cut always resulted in a positive number even when the distance from the edge was zero.

This had an impact on dimensioning the part on a drawing using model items – you wouldn't dimension to a point in thin air. Now you can dimension the cut on the face...

... and capture the dimension so it can be driven to zero when it is required to cut through the edge of the face.

Also when the cut out is usually positioned about a centre line (as in the image directly above) but sometimes can jump to the other side of the centre line, driving the dimension to a negative number flips it to the other side. See the image below.

All good stuff for design automation!

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