Less glitchy surfaces and fillets, for a start.
Parasolid is the industry’s favorite 3D modeling kernel, and keeping an eye on its underlying capabilities and development is key to understanding the potential future direction of CAD tools that are based on it. More than 130 vendors have produced 350 applications based on the Parasolid XT data format, which will keep models based on this format relevant and vibrant well into the future.
The enhancements in Parasolid V 34.1 reflect the most important developments you have been hearing about in CAD. Because Parasolid is a core modeling kernel, the enhancements always reflect a focus on modeling capabilities rather than the broad list of other tasks a general CAD application needs to perform.
Surface Modeling
Surface modeling enhancements include:
- In mid-surfacing operations, neutral sheets can now be created from faces in two sheet bodies, removing the restriction that faces must be created from a single solid.
- When offsetting an edge to fill a gap with an adjacent model, creation of a natural curve extension can now be specified, which avoids the creation of non-smooth offset edges.
These enhancements will make it easier to create offsets from surfaces made up of faces that are not continuously tangent. This is a frequent cause of failure in many offset operations, including thin-wall shelling and when applying a solid thickness to a surface body.
Lattice Modeling
Lattice modeling is generally related to the creation of support structures for 3D-printed structures but can be used in any modeling application where it is necessary to replace a volume of material with a simplified or optimized support structure. Rather than requiring users to manually produce 3D patterns, Parasolid has been developing version 34.1 to provide more user-driven flexibility in lattice creation:
- Rods of different diameter are permitted in the same model.
- When combining lattices, several options are provided to snap near-coincident balls (rod intersections) together if they are within a specified tolerance.
- When combining lattices, an option allows coincident rods to be kept or deleted.
- Facet mesh creation from self-intersecting lattice bodies is improved to handle the resulting disjoint meshes.
Modeling with Mixed Models
Recent releases of Siemens Digital Industries Software (DIS) 3D CAD software have included enhancements in Convergent Modeling, which allows the use of traditional BREP/NURBS techniques as well as faceted modeling. These technologies can be combined to create faces of a single solid body. This allows multiple sources and techniques to work on single engineering and design models. Further, the enhancements in Parasolid 34.1 allow boundary representation (BREP) techniques, such as healing the surrounding model after deleting a face, to work even with the faceted data.
For example, in the following image, the blue faces have been deleted, causing the model to heal itself and trim back or extend the surrounding faces.
Blending Mixed Models
As models start using mixed modeling technologies, there will be a greater need for the different technologies to interact. Extending/trimming/healing shown in the previous example is one way to address this. Blending (creating rounds and fillets) is another case where new features will have to potentially interact with geometry created using these two sets of tools. Users commonly run into situations where fillets and rounds produce either failed or awkward results, especially at the ends of the feature. The software usually has to figure this out on its own without input from the user. Parasolid 34.1 has added a couple of enhancements to help blended features end gracefully by making better quality cap faces when extending a mesh.
