Overview

Welcome to the Part Design User’s Guide. This guide is intended to help you get familiar with the Part Design product. It has been designed to show you how to create a part. There are several ways of creating a part. This book covers all the stages for creation of a part.

This overview provides the following information:

Part Design in a Nutshell
The Part Design application makes it possible to design precise 3D mechanical parts with an intuitive and flexible user interface, from sketching in an assembly context to iterative detailed design. Part Design application will enable you to accommodate design requirements for parts of various complexities, from simple to advanced.

This application, which combines the power of feature-based design with the flexibility of a Boolean approach, offers a highly productive and intuitive design environment with multiple design methodologies, such as post-design and local 3D parameterization.

As a scalable product, Part Design can be used in cooperation with other current or future companion products such as Assembly Design and Generative Drafting. The widest application portfolio in the industry is also accessible through interoperability with CATIA Solutions Version 4 to enable support of the full product development process from initial concept to product in operation.

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. The guide also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

You may also like to read the following complementary product guides, for which the appropriate license is required:
  • Sketcher User's Guide: explains how to sketch 2D elements.
  • Wireframe and Surface User's Guide: explains how to create wireframe geometry and surfaces.

Getting the Most out of this Guide
To get the most out of this guide, we suggest you start reading and performing the step-by-step tutorial Getting Started. This tutorial will show you how to create a basic part from scratch.

Once you have finished, you should move on to the next sections dealing with the handling of CATPart data, then the creation and modification of various types of features you will need to construct parts. This guide also presents other Part Design capabilities allowing you to design complex parts. You can also take a look at the sections describing the Part Design Workbench at the end of the guide.

Accessing Sample Documents
To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents contained in the online/prtug/samples folder.

When samples belong to capabilities common to different products, those samples will be found in the online/cfysm_XX/samples folder.

For more information about this, see Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.

Conventions Used in this Guide
To learn more about the conventions used in this guide, see the Conventions section.