Overview

Welcome to the FreeStyle Shaper Optimizer & Profiler User's Guide!
This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the product.
This overview provides the following information:

FreeStyle in a Nutshell

FreeStyle Shaper is a powerful modeling tool used to dynamically design all types of surface elements, from the stylist's drawing to the final surface, ready for the manufacturing processes.

Using this product you can generate free-form 3D curves and surfaces from scratch, and dynamically deform and analyze all produced elements.

Using the FreeStyle Optimizer you can create and modify curve and surface shapes based on other elements such as digitized data.

Using FreeStyle Profiler, you can directly create complex surfaces based on profiles and sets of curves in one step, without having to deform them in a second step.

The FreeStyle Shaper, Optimizer & Profiler User's Guide has been designed as an aid to using the FreeStyle Shaper, FreeStyle Optimizer, and FreeStyle Profiler by themselves, but also in conjunction with other workbenches.

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

You may also like to read the following complementary product guide:

  • CATIA V4 Integration User's Guide presents interfaces with standard exchange formats and most of all with CATIA V4 data.

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading and performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial. This tutorial will show you how create a set of surfaces.

Once you have finished, you should move on to the Basic Tasks and Advanced Tasks sections, which deal with handling all the product functions.

The Workbench Description section, which describes the FreeStyle workbench, and the Customizing section, which explains how to set up the options, will also certainly prove useful.

Navigating in the Split View mode is recommended. This mode offers a framed layout allowing direct access from the table of contents to the information.

Accessing Sample Documents

To perform the scenarios, sample documents are provided all along this documentation. For more information on accessing sample documents, refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.