Hi Spaceclaimers

This is my first post on the forum.

 

First of all i want to say that I am impressed with the powerful modeling capabilities and the fluid, clean, uncluttered interface. You have done a very solid job so far.

These suggestions might be slightly colored by the fact that i am long time Rhino user. It may be also be that I actually misunderstand a couple things in Spaceclaim since I have not used it before. I find it to be excellent for modifying existing geomerty. I opened a complex "free form" mouse made in Rhino and was able to change variable fillets, move complex faces, work in 2d section mode (very nice btw.). I was even able to shell it without any problem, something i didn't expect.

On the other hand, I found Spaceclaim to be a tad awkward for creating geometry from scratch on things that don't align with the Cartesian coordinate system (like a 4 sided pyramid for example). The reasons for that, I think I have pinned down below. Don't get me wrong, SC has some really effective workflows not found in other software when doing thing from scratch. And as i said, I might have missed some points, as I just jumped in without doing any tutorials first.

1.The first thing that strikes me is a feeling of being somewhat "lost" when modeling something from scratch, A permanently visible world cPlane would help a lot in this respect. I think a plane is more intuitive than a xyz anchor. It should also always be possible to see and find the world 0 in my opinion. Is it a good idea to add this as an option?

When changing grids, i found it to be "trigger happy". Could it be possible to also have this way of doing it as an option: click the "move grid icon" select for example the x + z axis, and your plane is set to that plane... And to offset it, you could click the "move grid icon" and pull it by a numeric value. Could you also be able to use the move tool to move the grid?

2. I also miss a 3d point object, so one can start modeling something by positioning reference points first, directly in 3d. Coordinate readout, and placement by coordinates would also be a helpful feature.

3. Could it be possible to use Pull tool to pull out a cylinder from a line directly (just by pushing on the line) That would make it easier to position cylinders by setting up centerlines in advance, and then pushing them out afterwards. (Easier to see what you re doing too) I found the cylinder tool a bit difficult when setting up cylinders directly in 3d.

That's all for now. Keep up the good work.

 

The Best,

Fredrik

 Hello Fredrik,

Thank you for the kind words; glad to hear you are enjoying your experience with SpaceClaim.

To address your questions:

1. You may be looking for the "Show World Origin" option on the Display tab.  This will place an origin at the world 0. This is obviously not the cPlane you want, but you can easily create a Datum Plane from the origin.  I will pass along an enhancement request to Development for the world cPlane.

Also, in the Service Pack we are expecting to release next week, we have introduced the Set Spin Center command, which should help you to keep your bearings when rotating the model.

As far as moving the sketch grid with the standard Move tool, there is a Move grid Option under Move, as well as a button on the mini-toolbar (found by right clicking), which may help you move your grid faster.

2. While we do not currently support 3d point creation, we are adding the ability to "Enable XYZ Measurements" in the Measure tool in SP1.  This will display the difference in the X, Y and Z directions between two selected objects.

3. Once again, you are describing functionality included in our soon to be released Service Pack.  The workflow is slightly different than you describe, however. To create cylinders from a series of curves, you will simply select the curves (or edges) and then hit the Cylinder tool, at which point you only need to enter in a radius and SpaceClaim generates cylinders (or swept tubing) along the curves.

 

I think you will enjoy these and a number of other enhancements in the upcoming Service Pack, and we always appreciate new suggestions for improving the product further in future releases.

Regards,

James