Hello
I am a long time solidworks user and am interested in designing custom watches with intricate bezel designs
I would like to use solidworks for all my art designs but I have not found a nice way of creating "textured" surfaces and "reliefs"
The only software that I see so far that I can directly import into solidworks is Rhino 3dm file format
Does anybody have direct experience with using Rhino and Solidworks and if so how "reliable is importing rhino files into solidworks"
Thanks in advance for any help on this subject
Regards
Steven G
Steven,
I thought someone would have responded with some specific Rhino experience, as I do not use Rhino. I do follow how Rhino is being used, and its capabilities with plugins, so I believe I can address this question to an extent. While I would not rule out using SolidWorks to do the modeling, once you are familiar with all the surfacing tools, I think I need a better understanding of what you want to achieve.
High frequency and/or organic detail (if that is what you mean by texturing) is typically not cost effective to model either in SolidWorks or in Rhino (or in most nurbs modelers for that matter). This is generally done in a poly modeling application, and the results are converted to nurbs. Rhino has the T-Spline plugin that can accomplish this, and there's a lot of discussion about it over on the McNeel forum.
Recently, a plugin has been created for SolidWorks called PowerSurfacing. While its not exactly the same, it does have similar capabilities. At one point there was a T-Spline plugin for SolidWorks (TSelements) with very limited capabiliies compared to the full T-Spline application. It appears development has not continued since 2011, so it would be safe to say PowerSurfacing is probably the only SolidWorks option at this time.