BELLEVUE, WA – August 1, 1999 – Solid Modeling Solutions is pleased to announce its latest feature extensions to SMLib covering fillets and blends. By working closely with its customers, the latest release of SMLib has introduced the first capabilities for multi-surface fillets and extensive blending functionality. SMS has implemented an Object Oriented Filleting Framework that handles the basic topological cases and includes a useful set of geometric cases. The Framework handles most of the bookkeeping tasks and is designed to enable the user to easily extend or customize the existing filleting capabilities.
The generation of fillet geometry has two major components that may be modified - the way the rails are generated and the way geometry is used to create the cross sections. Three rail tracing methods have been implemented; constant radius fillet, constant distance/angle between surface, and a variable radius fillet function. The Filleting Framework enables SMLib users to create additional rail tracing techniques quickly and efficiently.
SMS has also implemented the following three cross section geometry types: rational, circular, non-rational circular approximation, and linear. With these capabilities, one can now generate fillets with various combinations of the above rail generation techniques and cross section geometries.
Perhaps the most difficult part of this whole problem is the handling of different corner cases based on the type of edge being filleted and the radii of the fillets entering a vertex. SMS has implemented 20 different corner cases and has a default mechanism for blending corners using the N-sided patch from SMLib. This is an area where various customizations will occur based on different target applications such as plastics, auto body design and sheet metal. Users should be able to implement new corner cases in one or two days. Analytic fillet surface cases (e.g. torus, cylinder and cone) and analytical corners (e.g. sphere and torus) have been added to improve accuracy and down stream reliability.
SMS has augmented the surface definitions with implicit fillet information to capture the fact that a surface was generated from a blending operation. This is useful for refining the surface when operations like Booleans occur. If a fillet is cut, additional knots are inserted to make the vertices very accurate. Further, SMS has used the powerful solver capability in SMLib to solve for exact edge/rail and rail/rail intersections prior to the generation of the fillet surface. This has ensured that only the portions of the fillet are generated that are needed and that they are exact at the topological vertices when initially created.
SMLib continues to be licensed for $2000/month for internal use at one site or $2500/month for external use of the resultant applications with no royalty charges. More details can be found on the SMLib website at www.smlib.com. For more information, contact:Robert Blomgren, VP of R&D, Solid Modeling Solutions, (206) 463-1417, sales@smlib.com
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