Overview

Welcome to the Generative Sheetmetal Design User's Guide. This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the Generative Sheetmetal Design Version 6 product. This overview provides the following information:

Generative Sheetmetal Design in a Nutshell

The Generative 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 Sheetmetal representations in concurrent engineering between the unfolded or folded 3D shape representation.

Generative Sheetmetal Design offers the following main functions:


  • Associative and dedicated Sheetmetal feature-based modeling
  • Concurrent engineering between the unfolded or folded 3D shape representation
  • Access to company-defined standards tables
  • Dedicated drawing capability including unfolded view and specific settings.

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

Natively integrated, Generative Sheetmetal Design offers the same ease of use and user interface consistency as all V6 applications.

As a scalable product, Generative Sheetmetal Design can be used in cooperation with other current or future companion products in CATIA V6 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 Generative Sheetmetal Design User's Guide has been designed to show you how to design Sheetmetal 3D shapes of varying levels of complexity.

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 6 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 6 products. It also describes the general layout of V6 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 mechanical 3D shapes.
  • Assembly Design User's Guide: explains how to design assemblies.
  • Generative Drafting User's Guide: explains how to generate drawings from 3D shapes and assembly definitions.

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you first read the sections dealing with the handling of Mechanical Product data. Then you should move on to the creation and modification of various types features you will need to construct representations.

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

The Workbench Description section, which describes the Generative Sheetmetal Design workbench, and the Customizing section, which explains how to customize the Generative Sheetmetal Design workbench, will also certainly prove useful.