Overview

Welcome to the Generative Shape Design User's Guide !
This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the product.
This overview provides the following information:
 

Generative Shape Design in a Nutshell

The Generative Shape Design workbench allows you to quickly model both simple and complex shapes using wireframe and surface features. It provides a large set of tools for creating and editing shape designs and, when combined with other products such as Part Design, it meets the requirements of solid-based hybrid modeling.

The feature-based approach offers a productive and intuitive design environment to capture and re-use design methodologies and specifications.

This new application is intended for both the expert and the casual user. Its intuitive interface offers the possibility to produce precision shape designs with very few interactions. The dialog boxes are self explanatory and require practically no methodology, all defining steps being commutative.

As a scalable product, Generative Shape Design can be used with other Version 5 products such as Part Design and FreeStyle Shaper and Optimizer. 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.

This User's Guide has been designed to show you how to create and edit a surface design part. There are numerous techniques to reach the final result. This book aims at illustrating these various possibilities.

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 guides:

  • Part Design User's Guide

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 to create a basic shape design part.

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 Generative Shape Design 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.