Monday 21 April 2014

How To Navigate Around The CATIA Interface - CATIA Tutorials for Beginners - The Specification Tree

In this next entry in our CATIA tutorials for beginners series, we'll learn about some of the navigation tools and other ways of getting around the interface. In this entry we'll talk about the Specification Tree. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a tree-like structure that is called the Specification Tree. This is a list of each feature its supporting geometry in your model. In CATIA, each item in your model has its own node, and you can edit each one right from this tree.

What's great about the Specification Tree in CATIA is that you can easily see how your model was built, and the order the features were created. It's your at-a-glance map of all of the work on the page. It shows you how your model was constructed, and this is the greatest way to reverse-engineer a model, by reviewing its nodes in the tree.  The feature tree is such a great and user-friendly way to display your model that all the other principal CAD software packages have adopted it, like SOLIDWORKS and Inventor.


The specification tree is basically your single most important navigation tool in CATIA. Every single item you create is recorded here, and all of the parent items have expandable and collapsible branches, where you can see all the supporting entities used to crate that item. You expand and collapse the nodes of the tree using the plus and minus symbols that appear next to the item name. Click the "plus" sign to expand the item. Click the "minus" sign to collapse the item.


This concludes this entry in our CATIA tutorials for beginners series. Stay tuned for our next entry, where we'll talk about other ways of getting around the interface. 

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