SpaceClaim Primer: Up and Running in Half an Hour

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Hi, welcome to the SpaceClaim Primer. One of the first things to know about SpaceClaim is that it can open a variety of CAD formats without any additional license. So all major 3D CAD formats, except for NX, can be opened without an additional license. Let's go ahead and bring in a Parasolid file.

This is what it looks like. SpaceClaim, in many ways, looks visually similar to many CAD tools. Many common geometry modeling operations you may be used to, though, are contained within a handful of tools here. The primary ones are the Select, Pull, Move, and Combine.

Let's get started by looking at the Pull tool. So you can press Pull and select a face or edges, and just drag that face up and down. So at first glance, this may look like very similar functionality to just, say, modeling an extrude operation in your CAD tool. But Pull is so much more than that.

It actually looks at the content of the CAD. It looks at the context of your geometry and tries to compute what your intention is going to be.

So this face here, if you pull this up, you might be expecting just an extrude of the profile, but you can see that it actually extended this chamfer out until the end. Now if you want to just extrude the profile, you will actually need to select the edges as well. So I'm holding Control.

And now you can actually double-click on an edge loop to select the entire edge loop. This way, it will pull the profile like you may have expected if you don't know SpaceClaim. You can also modify the direction of the pull using these overlays here.

And these overlays are a common theme in SpaceClaim. You will select a tool, and then it will give you instructions. And you'll have options or different ways to go about applying them. A lot of functionality is packed into this one operation of pull.

So you can see you can modify the direction of the pull. Now this is going to be pulled in that direction. You can also revolve by selecting the appropriate overlay. And so select the revolve axis. And we can see that we can revolve the face in space.

And then so that is primarily the pull as it pertains to faces. When you do this on edges, it has a number of different functionalities. So you can select an edge loop, again double-clicking. And we can pull to create a fillet automatically. We can also do the opposite to get rid of a fillet.

We can have a number of different options. So we saw the creating a fillet or a round. You can also change it to create a chamfer. And once the chamfer is created, you can use these combination of pull handles to modify the fillet. You can also use the surface. Use the edges to create a new surface.

So this is like extruding an edge into a surface. And from these, you can do all the other operations that you expect. And you can extrude this in either direction. You can also copy and imprint the edge. And you can modify the draft of the edge. And you can modify the draft of the edge.

And you can also do the same thing in the other direction. After showing each of these, I'm using something else that you can do in SpaceClaim that is not commonly found in CAD tools. I've been doing undo. I've been using the control shortcut, the control Z.

So you can do things, undo and redo very nicely and easily. Using SpaceClaim is a lot more like using, say, a paint program than it is a CAD program in many ways. And the pull tool is very powerful. So you can do things, if you select multiple faces, you can do something similar to an offset.

So I've just selected one face up until now. But as you can see, when you use the pull tool in this manner, it also becomes a very powerful offset tool. That works not just in the domain of sketches, but in the domain of 3D geometry. So that's an introduction to the pull tool.

The next tool is the move tool. So it has a lot of similarities to the move tool. You can select features and not just entire bodies, but features and move them. So when you do the move tool, you'll have this geometry, the triad here. And this triad determines how you move it.

So you can select the geometry. You can select these axes to move it translationally. You can also move it rotationally. You can create copies by holding down control of features. And you can even do patterns in addition to the patterns that you see here.

And the pull tool is not just for moving faces around. You can also use it to modify the geometry in ways that would be very difficult in other CAD tools.

So unless you had the foresight in your features to set up this type of modification, this would be something that would be rather difficult to do in a traditional CAD tool. There's also the fill tool. This is a quick way to get rid of CAD features.

You can also use the fill tool to move faces around. But also, because SpaceClaim shares a lot of similarities with paint programs, you can also select faces and just press the delete key and accomplish something similar in many cases for some of the more simple feature removal functions.

And the combine tool is a little bit more complicated. The combine tool is the last thing. It is for splitting objects. So not just for combining, for splitting. And then so we can create a cutter body using functionality that we saw before.

The surface here, shown in the model tree, would be our cutting body. So we press the combine tool. Select our target object, like it says. And select our cut object. And we have the option of removing either of these bodies. That's the combine tool. You can also combine with planar surfaces.

So we can create a plane. Selecting these two axes. Whenever you had a pet cylindrical face in SpaceClaim, there's this axis that allows you to easily select the origin of the circular face. Then create a plane. That plane will be aligned by the two axes that we selected.

And now when we do combine, we combined our two bodies that we had before. And we can cut them now via the plane. And it's a nice way to kind of get a cross-sectional view. And when we just have planar faces like that, a lot of times it's easier to use the split body operation.

So with this we can just select a body, then select planar faces, and it'll just work like we expect it to. So the point about cross-sections, is that it's not just a plane. It's a cross-section.

There's actually a dedicated tool in SpaceClaim for working with cross-sections, and it gives you a lot of nice functionality. So here in this view mode, we have three major view modes.

There are 3D mode that we've been in this entire time, sketch mode for doing sketches similar to how it works in CAD programs, and section mode. So we can create a cross-section. And work with the geometry in this dedicated cross-section view.

So we'll see that without modifying our geometry, we still get this view. And the functionalities that we showed before also work in the cross-section view.

And the other thing is, when we use things like the pull tool, when we select an edge here, that corresponds to a face in the 3D mode, and these bodies were merged because they're on the same level in the structure tree. And we can do similar things to before with fillets.

So whereas before we selected an edge, here we select a point, and we can see in the 3D mode, this creates the fillet, similar to how it worked in the 3D mode. And so that's not the only way to really section out your geometry and work with pieces of it.

SpaceClaim also has a powerful clip with volume mode. So this allows me to select somewhere in the model, and create a bounding box for everything that I want to see, and then it excludes everything else.

So this is still actually a 3D mode, and we can do all of the things that we were doing before, similarly, but just the parts of the geometry that we excluded are not shown. And we can just get rid of that by right-clicking and doing Clear in the Clip with Volume context menu.

So the last mode is the Sketch mode, and this works similar to CAD tools, really. You just select a planar face, and now we have these sketch entities that we can draw. And this works pretty much as you would expect.

When we go back into the 3D mode, by either selecting one of the pull menus or selecting the appropriate mode, these curves in the structure tree get converted into higher order entities.

So because this is right on a face, this face of a 3D body, it actually turns into a sketch imprint, and we can pull this and do the things that we saw before to create the geometry.

And on that note, higher order, we have a point here, and this point, if we extrude this, turns into a line, and if we extrude the line, this turns into a surface. And the surface turns into a 3D when you extrude that. So that lets you know how the dimensionality works in SpaceClaim.

So you can also sketch directly on a face without going into 3D mode using this, the Face Curve Sketch. And so you can just use interpolated splines to create faces this way. And it has kind of a funky profile. But that's the abilities that SpaceClaim has.

SpaceClaim also has many organizational aids. So this entire time, we've been in this structure tab here on the sidebar, and we can move over to the Layers tab. We see layers. And then so layers are a nice way to organize your model. So we create a new model, and then we can assign this body.

So we select an entire body by triple-clicking on it. And now we can assign this to the layer. So now we have one layer, and now we have one body in one layer, and the other bodies in the other layers. And we can show or hide these other bodies in this way.

And on that topic of productivity enhancements, we can go over to this Selection tool. So say you wanted to remove all of these fillets, or maybe all of these small faces here.

Now in this simple model, it doesn't take too much time to go in and select everything, but CAD engineers work with more complex models on a day-to-day basis. And that's where the selection, power selection, on the left comes in handy.

So when I select this body, it comes up with a number of different suggestions for me on faces that it can select that share some things in common. So I can select, say, coaxial surfaces, so that this will select everything that uses that axis as a feature.

I can also select faces with the same area. And using this, I can select all of these small faces, and then something like Delete, I can remove all of them very quickly. And then so this is a quite nice functionality enhancement.

And using this, I'm actually going to show you how we can combine this with some of the other things that we saw to fix something that's actually been bothering me about this model. So if we look at this on the top view and re-enable our plane, we can see that this hole is not symmetric.

So we can change that using the power selection in the Move tool. And I'm going to show you how. First, we will select these faces and then we will control select all the other faces with the same area. So that way we can quickly select all of these faces with similar features.

Then we're going to unselect these, again holding control, and then move the rest of the faces. So we're going to move these faces along a path. So this is similar to a sweep method. So we select Move Along a Trace, and then we're going to select this edge. And now we can move these faces like this.

So how do we make sure that we move these faces so that this is right onto this plane? Well, we can set the Move Handle. So whenever you have the Move tool, you have a Move Handle like this, and this sets what you move relative to. So it just kind of selected the midpoint of this edge by default.

But we can set the Move Handle to be this axis of this feature. Now that is aligned. And now we can use the Up To tool to specify what we want to move to instead of entering a value or just doing it visually by moving this around with the mouse.

So if we select Up To, and then this plane, we can see how this is now fixed. And so that just gives you an idea of the power of SpaceClaim. And that is just really in model, general modeling and preparation and cleanup.

And SpaceClaim has, all of the functionality that we come to expect for preparing analyses for CAE. So it has Repair to do things like fixed geometry problems in an automated way. And then Prepare does many of the things that we're used to.

So something like a Volume Extract, if I wanted to do a CFD simulation, I use the Volume Extract to create the negative fluid volume of the 3D tools that we have here. And SpaceClaim makes this very easy. So here I'm going to select the edge loops of capping surfaces, basically.

So I'm just going to fill the inside of this with water. And that's how it works. And we can see in the structure tree here that the interior water volume is created. And then this is one mode where the cross section view comes in handy.

So we can see if we want to modify how this looks, we can do our geometry modifications. And then because this fluid fill volume is actually a smart object, we can update the volume to the context of the 3D geometry around it. We can also do multi-body parts in SpaceClaim.

So if I were to throw this over to Mechanical, it would need contacts to connect these two different bodies and to actually show the different bodies. I can have it randomize the colors. And we can see that we have three different bodies here.

They would need to be connected by contact unless I do the following. I select all of these bodies. And then I move them to a new component. Now this component, and the properties of it, there's a share topology option. And I can set it to share topology.

And now SpaceClaim will connect all of these bodies at the geometry level while still being separate bodies. And I won't need contact to connect them. And I can show the contact that will be created from the shared topology with this tool.

So these are new edges that will be created because of touching edges from another body. Another thing that we like to do when preparing geometry for CAD is parameterizing it.

So when you bring a geometry into SpaceClaim, it does not know about all of the parameter history from SolidWorks or Pro Engineer or Inventor or anything. And a lot of times, you may not either have the software or a license for the computer. You may not have easy access to that.

So in SpaceClaim, you're starting with what you could call a dumb geometry. But SpaceClaim makes it really easy to add smarts to this geometry. So if we go back to the very first operation that we did, we have this. This is a tool called the Pool tool. And we see this little P here.

And this P, if we were to click this, creates a parameter. So the parameters are under the Groups tool. And this Groups tool deals with parameters and name selections. So if we were to create a name selection of this face, if we just select this face and do Create Group, that'll be a name selection.

And so that's how that works. But now with this dimension here, we have a persistent dimension that we can modify that Workbench will be aware of and that it will work like a parameter. And you can do other things like, you know, maybe just the offset of this Pool tool is not very meaningful to you.

You can actually set the ruler of this, offset, to be relative to something that may be of more interest to you. Say for model height. Now, this basically specifies the model height by pooling this feature. So that's how you do parameters in SpaceClaim with the more simple, easier way.

But it does have limitations. So for example, if I wanted to specify the model height by pooling two different faces, this actually is not going to do what I expect because that ruler reference location stays fixed. It does not move with this bottom face.

So in order to do that, you can do parameters in another way. It is, so with the detail, you can create what's called an annotation plane, dimension, and I select the plane. And now, here I can create sheet dimensions, similar to a drawing sheet in a CAD tool.

It will do lengths, and it will do diameters, and angles. But now, when I do the pool tool, I will see these dimensions will have this little asterisk next to them. And then so, that means that similar to doing the ruler, I can drive this operation by one of these dimensions.

And make that a parameter as well. And if I do it this way, so select this face, and then select this face, drive that by this dimension, we can see that this dimension will be correct as both of the faces change. So SpaceClaim also has a lot of great reverse engineering tools.

So let's go ahead and look at some of the other tools that we can use to do this. So SpaceClaim is a tool that is used to create a lot of different faces. So we can, for instance, insert a picture right into SpaceClaim.

So if you imagine that this is, say, a drawing sheet, or a concept of something that you want to create, you can very easily use this as a reference, and you can move and rotate it very similarly to any other object in SpaceClaim.

And so, we can draw on this, and we can go in and very quickly and conveniently and easily create, create this in CAD. But SpaceClaim allows you to go beyond that. If we go to the Insert tool, we have this entire reverse engineering section.

So if we go and use Vectorize Image here, it can actually extract curves from the image. And you can select things like the trace method and the threshold for selecting the curves. But if we just go with this, we can see that we have curves here.

And these curves can be extruded into a surface similar to how everything else we've seen before. That's a very quick way to turn a concept into 3D geometry. But SpaceClaim can do even more than that.

So one of the ways in that SpaceClaim is unique is that you can load mesh data in the same document that you have 3D geometry in. So this is a surface scan, like it would be the output from a CT scan or other that is commonly used in reverse engineering.

And then so this is not a 3D CAD NURBS surface object. This is in fact a different type of object type at all. It's not a surface. It's not a solid. It's a facet mesh. And you can load and work with these in SpaceClaim, similarly to how you can load and work with other things.

And so SpaceClaim has specialized tools for working with meshes as well. Now for bulkier items, you can fit simple primitives like a sphere or a cylinder. And fit these to the surface. You can see that the radius here is tied to mesh points.

But this isn't a very good representation of this more complex biomedical geometry. You can do things like extract curves where it intersects with a plane. So I can create a plane. And I can create a copy of this plane holding down control.

And back at the reverse engineering tools, I can select planes that intersect the bodies. And it will extract curves from there. And if I wanted to turn this into a 3D geometry, I could do something like the blend functionality. And then so this is a very faceted curves, a very faceted face.

So what I could do is before using the blend tool, I could use the curve repair tool that SpaceClaim has. So for instance, curve gaps, I could have it search for and find curve gaps. This seems to be all close, which is not always the case. And it can also, each of these is a straight line here.

And what it can do is fit curves to try and convert some of these lines into things like arcs and whatnot. So a lower number of bodies, a lower number of line segments. There might be a gap. Nope. And now, when I create the blend, it looks a little better.

Another tool in the reverse engineering toolbox is skin surface. So when I don't have those profiles like that, I may have to fit surfaces to the body and build those surfaces sort of manually. And the skin surface tool allows me to do that. So I can select these faces and have it fit a surface.

And have it fit a surface to the bounding box. So I have in yellow the control points of the surface. And in blue are the vertices of the surface. And in this way, I can go through and create a surface of the entire body. So I'm not just limited to one surface, of course. I can create more surfaces.

Double click to insert a vertex. Single click to insert a control point. And this way I can patch surfaces. I can do square surfaces. And create that surface first. And I can also do triangular surfaces. And I can also do triangular surfaces. And I can also do square surfaces.

So in that way, I can go through the process of skinning a complex model with the appropriate amount of surfaces to your application. The other thing you can do is this skin surface tool is actually quite powerful in that it allows you to streamline that workflow of extracting curves.

of extracting curves. And it allows you to actually do it in a much better and more convenient and efficient way. So I'm going to create a number of different planes here. And then go back to the skin surface. I'm going to select I'm going to select one plane after another.

And we can see that it'll skin the surface between the two curves. between the two curves. And I can do this for multiple surfaces. And I can do this for multiple surfaces. And when I go ahead and create that surface, you'll see something that actually does not look half bad.

you'll see something that actually does not look half bad. you'll see something that actually does not look half bad. This is something that can be meshed very efficiently in your analysis tool.

And I'm not going to show it here, but once you've done this, you can always check the deviation of your surface to a mesh body. to a mesh body. So that concludes this SpaceClaim Primer. It was a tour through many of the most powerful features of SpaceClaim.

And hopefully this will be a good jumping off point to get you started with it. If you have any questions, please contact us at ozenengineering.inq. Thank you.