A Computer Aided Design Modeler for Designing the Plastic Components Using a Set of Programmatic Operations

Abstract

Developments in the field of computer-aided design have targeted on reducing the time and efforts required of designer to define product models. Creating robust parametric [16] models is more time consuming especially as there can be hundreds of features and thousands of mathematical expressions to create. Even if combinations of low-level features [11] known as user-defined features are used, this process still involves inserting individual features into individual components and creating all the inter-part associativities. This work shows that programmatic operations designed for a specific product types (plastic components) can streamline the component-level design process much further because a single programmatic operation can create an unlimited number of low-level features modify geometry in multiple components and create new components. Results from user testing show that a set of high-level programmatic operations can offer savings in time and effort of over 70% and can be general enough to support user-specified component cross sections while leaving the majority of the primary design decisions open to the designer [13] .