Going from SW Concept to Final Design

I like that suggestion Rob. My answer to number 11.:

Although I ranked "(I) Better education..." 7th it is still very important to me. A section in the SW 'Help' discussing bspline surfaces and NURBS and the various accuracies of the surfaces along with best practices for approaching those accuracies would be helpful.

Harold

I didn't answer question 11, but maybe I'll answer it here. I thought most of the survey addressed general editability, not necessarily concept to final. Concept to final requires more conceptual changes, where the survey asked more tactical questions. The stuff in the survey also needs to be addressed, I mean you can't make changes without good editing tools. I hope they also choose to add some of the copying tools some have asked for.

The survey seems to assume that it is possible to reuse concept data, which often it is not, regardless of what tools you have available.

Another avenue that they might take would be to incorporate more direct editing tools, or to continue to develop the Freeform feature to be more like Rhino or better yet solidThinking. Some people consider direct editing tools in themselves to be concepting tools.

Maybe with some of this "freeze the tree" functionality others have discussed we can get away from the purist need to have a perfect tree, and only worry about the end geometry, but this might be too big of a philosophical shift for some users. I know in some cases that I spend a lot of time making sure the tree is perfect, when there is no need for that. Some might consider this sloppy and/or lazy, and others may simply consider it practical and time efficient.

Also, in order for me to want to go from concept to final models, there is going to have to be something to induce me to want to make concepts in SW in the first place. SW would have to include a better sketching method, probably using some sort of new hardware interface (touch, stylus), and might have to incorporate functionality from other tools used for concepting like Illustrator or Photoshop.

Returning to the tactical side, they really need to consider improvements to the spline editing interface. The current-since-2009 spline method where it predicts end of spline curvature has clearly failed. I really hate it. You can only see what you've sketched after you put down two additional spline points, and the curvature starts to settle down. Also, I'd like to see a better method for addition of spline points on the fly, maybe a modifier key shortcut or something. Something where you can place and move the point in a single stroke rather than place, clear the cursor, select and then move. Using the RMB menu to access Add Spline Point seems clumsy. Plus, I'd love to see the curvature comb option put on the LMB shortcut bars.

Very cool.

What particularly struck me is that a straight edge could then become a spline and retain the connectivity to a model.  All the time I am upgrading an arc to an ellipse in sketches and it hoses the model.  All the other stuff was great but this feature is what I would use the most.