This week’s selection is the detailed “SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible” by mechanical engineer Matt Lombard.
The book is not concerned with the basics of Solidworks, which it assumes the reader already knows, but instead focuses on an often complicated aspect of 3D modeling: surfaces.
Surfaces can be incredibly complex, yet subtle at the same time. Consider a passing automobile: look closely at its shape and you’ll see sweeping curves that are precision engineered.
How, exactly, do you make such complex shapes in Solidworks (or any 3D CAD tool, for that matter. This book, however, deals with Solidworks only.)
The book is also not concerned with the design of surfaces; those you would normally get from an industrial designer, whose concept would have to be implemented in engineering form for actual manufacturing. This book shows how you make a given complex surface, not which kinds of surfaces you need to use.
The book’s sections include a starter section defining the nature of surfaces before anything else. But then Lombard gets deep into the tools used for creating surfaces, including sketches, splines, fillets and shells. Next more advanced techniques are explained, where you can evaluate or manage a given surface model. Finally, there are a series of real-life examples where Lombard goes deep on how to create very complex surfaces for such projects as a plastic bottle, overmolds, a ladle and even using digitized data, something that’s becoming more frequently used.
This is a very detailed book containing well over 400 pages of great information for Solidworks users.
Via Amazon
