Wednesday 15 January 2014

The CATIA ToolBars for Beginners

CATIA V5 uses toolbar tailored to each environment to make it easier to find the appropriate tools. In this lesson, we'll be looking at some of these toolbar. Most CATIA tutorials will cover these toolbar, but in case you want a quick recap, here are my notes: The standard toolbar is available in any of the CATIA workbenches. From left to right, the tools are: New, Open, Save, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Help. To launch the part design workbench toolbar, you need to have a new part active. You'd choose the New button from the Standard toolbar, and then select Part from the New dialog.

The Part Design Workbench environment offers many toolbar, such as the View Toolbar. The View Toolbar contains all the commands you need to manipulate your view of your model. The commands from left to right are Fly Mode, Fly In, Pan, Rotate, Zoom in, Zoom out, Normal View, Create Multi-View, Isometric View, Shading with Edges, Hide/Show, Swap Visible Space.


There's also the Select toolbar and Sketcher toolbar, to speed up your selection of entities as well as your ability to activate drawing commands quickly, and your CATIA tutorials should definitely cover these. The Profile Toolbar is available in the Sketcher Workbench. From left to right, the tools are Profile, Rectangle, Circle, Spline, Ellipse, Line, Axis, Point. We use these tools to create geometric entities in our workspace.

Next is the Constraint Toolbar. From left to right, the tools are Constraints defined in dialog box, Constraint, Fix together, Animate constraint and Edit multi-constraint. We use constraints in CATIA to relate our geometric entities to one another, and to define the size of our geometry. This is what makes a CAD program different from a, for example, graphic design program--all entities have to be positioned in space, in relation to one another. This is for the obvious reason that a much higher level of precision is required for sketching when the results of your drawings are 3D machined parts, etc.

We use the Operation Toolbar to make adjustments to our sketches, like adding chamfers and fillets, or trimming and mirroring entities, etc. The tools, from left to right, are Corner, Chamfer, Trim, Mirror and Project 3D Elements. We’ll be picking up more from here shortly!







No comments:

Post a Comment