DESIGNER: Powerful

DESIGNER’s powerful design and detailing capabilities open up new possibilities for smarter manufacturing to a wide range of manufacturers.

The CAD application perfectly balances powerful design and detailing capabilities with ease of use. Even new users can easily harness DESIGNER’s wide variety of functions to successfully execute and optimise design for manufacturing projects.

Direct modelling

Direct modelling capabilities within DESIGNER frees the user from the constraints of a traditional history-based modelling system. Rather than modifying a lengthy series of parameters to make a design change, direct modelling allows the user to push, pull and drag the geometry to obtain the desired shape. These changes can be completely freeform or driven by numeric increments and measurements taken from existing geometry. Knowledge of how the original model was constructed is no longer a necessity and design changes are not restricted to the original methods of creation. Direct modelling gives the user complete freedom of construction, whether creating a new component from scratch or modifying an existing design created in any of the numerous of CAD formats that DESIGNER supports.

Geometry for manufacturing

DESIGNER provides a host of geometry creation techniques that are critical for model preparation. Hole capping is a great example of a simple and easy to use feature of DESIGNER that helps to ensure that surface machining provides the best possible results. This feature can be used to cap anything from a simple drilled hole to a complex open cavity with just a few clicks of the mouse. An extensive range of curve creation routines vastly improves boundary creation, and simple but powerful surface creation techniques provide the programmer with more power than ever before.

Model repair

Gaps in imported models are automatically healed, preventing manual time-consuming healing processes.
Where surfaces are corrupt or missing, DESIGNER will automatically create the boundaries, making it easy to identify and rebuild new faces using the comprehensive surfacing suite. Repairing corrupt bodies and closing surface models to produce a solid model eliminate construction problems later in the design process and immediately brings the benefits of solid modelling to the user. The ability to seamlessly switch between solid and surface technology provides unlimited freedom, ensuring the user can work with difficult CAD data.

Feature suppression

Incoming CAD data often includes features and geometry that are not required for traditional machining. Post-machining processes such as laser engraving, electrode marking, and other techniques will be represented on the original CAD model. While this is important for the CAD design and will ultimately reside in the final component, markings often impede the job of the CAM programmer. With DESIGNER, supressing these unrequired features or separating them for subsequent operations is just a mouse click away.

Model simplification

Alongside feature suppression, the user may wish to simplify geometry during various stages of the machining process. Removing regions of the model, such as intersecting features, improves the machining process. The power of direct modelling makes this very easy, without being held to the constraints of a previous construction method or feature tree. Creating model variations for each stage of the process becomes simple and the machining results are fast and of higher quality.

Advanced surfacing

DESIGNER’s surfaces module enables the creation and manipulation of complex, freeform surfaces such as lofted, helical, swept and tangential surfaces. The module includes more specialised surface creation tools, such as splitting parts into cavity and core, parting and split plane, bend relief for reducing and modifying complex bends, and the creation of large offsets from complex parts. Advanced trimming techniques complement the advanced surface creation functionality; this gives the user complete control when working with complex geometries.

Powerful sketching

DESIGNER’s sketching abilities allow the creation of two-dimensional shapes using freeform input. While the user can rely upon the traditional methods of coordinate-based input, freeform sketching intelligently interacts with surrounding geometry. This ability to intuitively create implied constraints with other geometry expedites the sketch creation process while maintaining the maximum flexibility for future changes.