One thing I really miss about NX is the ability to edit sketch dimension values without editing the sketch. Is NX the only software with this functionality?
NX has a “dependencies” window, that lists the relevant values for a feature. So if you click on the sketch in the history tree, all of the sketch dimensions are listed. You change the value of a dimension, and everything else updates. (Depending on how your software is setup.)
The quality of my example is poor. I haven’t used NX in a long time, and didn’t waste time prettying things up for this example.
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I’m a GIF, click me!
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They must’ve added that after the version I last used (NX4). The closest thing I can think of in SolidWorks is either double click the feature and edit the dimensions on screen. Or open the equation manager, select the “Dimension View” and edit the dimensions…however that list is not filtered and can get quite busy unless you rename your features to filter on.
Once you have instant 3D on, you can double click on a feature and all of it’s relevant dimensions show up…then you can click each one and modify at will and everything is updated immediately.
Solidworks has done a great job of adding efficiency to the software. Mouse gestures, bread crumbs, etc. all eliminate mouse clicks and make the user faster. But they’ve missed the fact that the overall layout could improve efficiency. Having the assembly navigator separate from the part navigator makes it much easier to find the feature you are looking for without all of the collapsing, expanding and scrolling. Some of this seems so obvious I’m surprised other companies haven’t copied the functionality.
Mostly I’m just reminiscing, but there was always a chance that SW had similar functionality I was unaware of. I really want to switch to NX, but I can’t justify the added cost.
Solid Edge has the Variable Table. Some models I would use it a lot, others not so much; depends on what the part was doing. It just shows every variable in the model, your screen shots look like there’s a tree view of dependency? I don’t know of anything like that in SE.
In Solid Edge this window can stay open while working in the model. Edit sketches, add features etc. Then tweak them from the Variable Table window and watch the model update; any dimension or feature property can be edited, patterns included. I have not figured out how to do the same in Solidworks.
Thanks. I will have to look at that in SE. In NX, it only lists the variables for the sketch/feature you have selected, so you don’t have to filter the entire list. I think you can do the same thing in NX be selecting the top level assembly.
I can see the active filter being nice an a big model, I don’t recall trying this in SE. This is where I would name all my dimensions that I cared about or had functionality/design intent. So that would group them due to the sorting by name, kinda like “favorites” in a way. All the equations/formula was done here as well, so if I wanted something to be 2x thickness or whatever I’d do it from the Variable Editor usually.
Solid Edge has Dynamic Edit that can be invoked when an Ordered feature is selected that shows the features dimensions/sketch. Dim values can be edited and sketch elements dragged if underconstrained.
In Sync mode, dimensions appear when the face/s they control are selected and of course faces can be dragged too.
Both of these work at the part level or assy level where the part is placed.
Hard to say. I am used to the NX method but the SW paradigm of having all feature info visible and available for double-clicking in the tree, irrespective of what level of the assembly is currently active, also has its advantages. Often kinda wish that NX had this also.
For me, what makes NX way more powerful in the sketch-edit arena is the ability to choose sketch edit WITHOUT rollback. It can be a bit confusing at first, because you can’t do the “temporal paradox” and select geometry that is actually downstream, but it is often really helpful to be able to do the sketch edit in the display context of what happens later.
Inventor, make sketch visible and you can double click on any dimension to change it.
Once it’s visible, you double click dimension in another sketch to edit and select dimension in any visible sketch to use them in equation.
both of those last posts talk about editing sketch dimensions without rollback, which you can do in SW as well.
what I didn’t see in the SE video (though I may have missed it): NX allows you to fully open a sketch and change all its content without model rollback. You see the model at its (later) state but you can go ahead and change everything in the sketch, not just the dimension values. You can add, delete and modify geometry freely. The changes don’t get propagated until you call a rebuild.
It’s sometimes hard to understand how useful this is, if you haven’t ever worked this way before. Since you can still see all the geometry from features downstream from your sketch, it makes it much clearer as to what your changes will actually end up doing. As said in my previous post, what you can’t do is create relations/dimensions to this downstream geometry. NX just won’t recognize it for clicking, which can be confusing… would be nice if there was some kind of “can’t pick this” symbol or such.
Last IV job I did was 2016. I don’t recall IV working the same way, but there might be the option. SW always rolls back on activating sketch edit.
I tried that master sketch / ssp stuff and never warmed to it, it always seemed to me like I was dealing with a stack of workarounds on workarounds. Plus the fact that geometry changes to the master sketch could often cause all downstream models to disintegrate. Guess it all depends on what you’re designing.
Change in SW will blow everything up.
It doesn’t maintain entity ID.
What it feels like is a creation list.
If you add entity, it go to end of list everything is fine.
If you delete ab entity, everything after that got move up and blow up.
Another funny is, SW will recreate the list sometime when you change something. Again all blow up.
IV is more stable.
And yes, modify sketch in IV will hide everything after it.
You can show the sketch and change dimensions without editing the sketch.
thought so, that’s a pity that IV also works that way.
off-topic: now what I really like about IV is how painless it is to re-attach dangling drawing dimensions. NX has an arguably more powerful system around drawing dimension geometry referencing, but re-attachment is more time-consuming than in IV for only a bit more flexibility. SW has unfortunately remained prehistoric by comparison regarding this.
