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Basic Concepts of Combining Parts and Surfaces | 577
Basic Concepts of Combining Parts and
Surfaces
You can use Mechanical Desktop
®
to create angular-shaped parts. You can
apply 3D surfaces to those parts to create hybrid parts consisting of a mixture
of angular and curved shapes. With Mechanical Desktop you can create
model designs with shapes of varying types.
You can apply surfaces to Mechanical Desktop parts and use those surfaces to
cut material from a parametric part, to create any hybrid shapes that your
design requires.
You can also use surfaces to add material to angular parts.
Using Surface Features
A feature created from surfaces has the shape of a contoured surface. You
either cut away material or add material as a protrusion to join it to a part.
In this tutorial, you cut away an angular face and replace it with a sculpted
surface.
Surfaces must have these characteristics to be used as features on models:
■ A contoured surface must have four logical boundaries.
■ The curved shape must be a single surface. If you need multiple surfaces
to represent the shape, you must join them into a single surface.
■ The surface must be a nontrimmed base surface. Join only base surfaces,
not interior trim edges of trimmed surfaces.
■ The surface must extend past the part on all four sides.
■ A surface cannot contain sharp corners.
■ Surfaces should have a minimum number of internal patches. These sur-
faces work better and faster than complex ones.
before surface cut
after surface cut