catia

Catia is a fully integrated development interface for solid and surface modeling, and also for analysis - engineering analysis - and manufacturing. So, with this fully integrated environment there are a lot of things that we can do. Mostly the way we use it in the class is for surface modeling and solid modeling, and rapid prototyping output as well. Ah, what I am going to show you is a little bit how it works. One of the features of Catia is that it is a fully parametric interface as well, which means that every single object and every single element is fully controlled with constraints and parent-child relationships and relations between objects.

Ah, I will show you a little bit how it works.

This is one model that we see here and one of the interesting features we look here at the top. For example, this line controls the height of this element and... as I drag this line the whole surface interactively updates and changes. This also works with any other entity I build. For example, this circle here... This circle here... which... has a formula by a radius, has an external diameter that controls the size of that circle.

Okay. So, here we have a value for the radius that parametrically controls the aperture of the top portion of the surface. What we're doing right now is just extending some of the initial features. And we see how the whole model updates.

At any point the designer can come and change any of these parameters and the whole model will update, and this is probably one of the most interesting features. Let's take this for instance. We are going to remove some of the tangencies of some of these lines. And now the model seems a little bit flatter than what we had before, especially on this side. I am going to go ahead and change this parameter, which is... controls the opening of this radius, and I am going to make this a larger opening. And there it is.

In this case here, it's a series of small surfaces that are being sweeped along some lines of ruling. So we have two lines that we created in geometry, and we build the surface using those two lines as basic objects.

This is one of the case where one of these warnings appear and basically it is telling us that things like this are not realistically possible. So, this is telling me also as well that there's part of the model we're stretching the parameters to the limit and beyond that they can be physically, realistically, made.

One interesting feature is that every single entity has a parent-child relationship which basically means that... uhm... every entity that I build in Catia... like this one that I have selected... it has three points as children, in this case three different geometric elements, but it also has another set of points that are depending on the location of the spine.

Another feature that we've been exploring is the rapid prototyping processing Catia interface in which we take one model, convert it into a solid model, and export it as a... file... extension file which can be used by a rapid prototyping machine, such as a Seacorp (sic), which will allow us to print - to make three-dimensional models - that would either take too long to make by traditional processes of cutting materials - flat materials.

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