Overview

Welcome to the SheetMetal Design User's Guide. This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the SheetMetal Design Version 5 product.

This overview provides the following information:

SheetMetal Design in a Nutshell

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The SheetMetal Design workbench is a new generation product offering an intuitive and flexible user interface. It provides an associative feature-based modeling, making it possible to design sheet metal parts in concurrent engineering between the unfolded or folded part representation.

SheetMetal Design offers the following main functions:

  • Associative and dedicated sheet metal feature-based modeling
  • Concurrent engineering between the unfolded or folded part representation
  • Access to company-defined standards tables
  • Dedicated drawing capability including unfolded view and specific settings.

All sheet metal specifications can be re-used by the Knowledge Advisor workbench to capture corporate knowledge and increase the quality of designs.

Natively integrated, SheetMetal Design offers the same ease of use and user interface consistency as all V5 applications.

As a scalable product, SheetMetal Design can be used in cooperation with other current or future companion products in CATIA V5 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.

The SheetMetal Design User's Guide has been designed to show you how to design sheet metal parts of varying levels of complexity.

Before Reading this Guide

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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, for which the appropriate license is required:
  • Part Design User's Guide: explains how to design precise 3D mechanical parts.
  • Assembly Design User's Guide: explains how to design assemblies.
  • Generative Drafting User's Guide: explains how to generate drawings from 3D parts and assembly definitions.
  

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

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To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading and performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial.

Once you have finished, you should move on to the next sections, which explain how to handle more detailed capabilities of the product.

The Workbench Description section, which describes the SheetMetal Design workbench will also certainly prove useful.

 

Accessing Sample Documents

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To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents contained in the online\cfysa\samples\SheetMetal folder. For more information about this, refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.