Geometric Constraint Solving and Spin Surfaces

In amongst all of the publicity around PLM Connection Europe it would have been easy to miss the announcement of the latest release of the D-Cubed 3D products. As it happens, the timing was a coincidence, but now that the releases have been delivered to our customers I would like to highlight one of the new features – support for spin surfaces in the 3D DCM.

As mentioned in a previous post, adding support for a new geometry type brings a number of benefits, and from version 44 the 3D DCM geometric constraint solver supports a “spin surface”. A typical example of generating a surface of this type is when a solid is created by rotating a planar sketch containing a spline curve. Built-in support for spin surfaces simplifies how an application adds them to the 3D DCM, and allows more advanced assembly and direct modelling operations to be performed on these geometries.

For example, it is now possible to add a concentric constraint between a spin surface and another geometry such as a circle, sphere or cylinder. Also, a parallel constraint, perpendicular constraint or angle dimension can be applied to the axis of a spin surface.

Within the core of the 3D DCM, there is a lot of code which takes account of the special properties of any geometry and adding spin surfaces has required a major effort by the D-Cubed development team. However, we think this new feature will allow our customers to further enhance geometric constraint solving in three dimensions.

New releases were also made of the other D-Cubed 3D components – the CDM, AEM and HLM. Full details of all the changes can be found by following the links in the announcement.

Mike