I must confess that the arms were quite a challenge for me.  My result is not perfect, I know, but I think it’s close enough.  Not so bad for a beginner, at least? Anyway, I had tried doing a surface sweep, but it didn’t look good, so I went with more lofts.  I started by creating some more geometry (What a surprise!).  I sketched a spline on the Top plane, following the silhouette of the ...

In this second part of my blog post I’ll show you how I worked the funkey’s feet. The feet were made in a very similar way to the body, with lofted surfaces, but I didn’t use Fill Surface to create a patch in this case, just the lofted surface. First of all, I created a plane that was parallel to the Right plane and used it to trim the bottom of the body, using the Trim Surface command with ...

When you’re on the road with a dog, one thing you learn pretty quickly is that your choices for food are limited because most places won’t allow dogs inside, not even little lap dogs.  I think we must’ve visited every single fast food place along I-70 on the way to Ohio and every single one along I-80 on the way back. Too much junk food!  Master Andrew seemed pleased, however, since he man...

Just as promised, here is the video of the second part of what was going to be my presentation at the local SWUG.  This one deals with Free Motion, changing component properties and changing the orientation and camera views during the animation.  By the way, I added a new option to the controls of the video. If you notice, there’s a button in the video control bar that will allow you to select...

While checking out the 2010 Beta, I ran into this new option available for Motion Studies, when you have SolidWorks Simulation added as well. You can find it listed as Structural Simulation Analysis for Motion in the What’s New Guide.  It simply means that in SolidWorks 2010, and with Motion and Simulation added, you can perform your stress, deformation or factor of safety analysis automaticall...

Just as I promised, I got one of the videos about Animation ready. This one is about the easiest part: using the Animation Wizard to create animations of exploded/collapsed assemblies and rotations. I apologize if the video is not the best, more in particular the audio of the video (I kind of don’t like my voice), but I still hope someone out there finds it useful.  Enjoy!     ...

Well, I just got an email from Kenneth to let all members know the meeting that was scheduled to happen on September 9th has been cancelled due to lack of interest/response. That’s a real bummer for me because I was going to do a presentation on creating simple animations using SolidWorks Motion Manager.  Anyway, just to get it out of my system, I think I’ll make a couple of videos about it w...

On a terribly off-topic note, today was the first day of school on this side of California. My little one is finally a kindergartener, which leaves some free time for me to go back to school and take at least one or two classes this fall.  So, I didn’t win the lotto, haven’t got that super-duper job I’ve been wishing for, and even some project I was very excited about ended up being a bit o...