Hi,

I am trying to find answers for - " How are these Surface Analysis features physically tested on the manufactured part or How does it pass Quality ?

Some of the Surface analysis features available with many Softwares... are

Reflection / Deviation / Dihedral Angles / Surface Continuity / Shaded Curvature Plot /Curve Vector / Dihedral Edge point /MIn Curvature / Max Curvature

I am eagerly waiting for some answers to these .Particularly Reflection plots and curvatures and how they are measured physically .

Or Is it that all of the above are just artistic surface evaluation tools and left for each designer to decide which is acceptable? I am getting a lot of numbers on each one of the evaluation tools available with the Softwares . So definetly not a matter of preferences i believe .. may be i am wrong too . !

Would be extremely happy if some body can throw some light on this .

Ciao

hello,

most diagnosis in software shows you something you dont reall now. as long as you dont know about the math of a shader model, you cannot trust all these shaded views, zebra stripes modes and whatever.

its very helpfull to make experience and skills with one software product where you compare diagnostic results in the software with milled results.

but software diagnostic are cool to, as long as you can interprete them.

A coomon tool is to cut sections through your model and calculate curvature plots on them. we use that for evaluating the continuity between surfaces and for evaluating the overall smoothness of surface sets.
for relatively flat surfaces i like a GAUSSIAN shader. this is available in several software packages. with this shader you can see areas of inflection or a curvature change (negativs to positive). often you can check for minimal radii using sahders as well.

In reality we use dynoc and water and a moeveable lightsource for evaluating the surfaces. lots of shader models are trying to immitate this. elliminate almost all of them, as long as they have a spherical mapping of a stripes pattern and those things.
if you have access to aliasstudio, use the ISOangle tool. In icem surf you can use the simple shading tool and move the lights like you would do in dynoc and clay.

another cool method is to distort the view (non proportiaonal view) and check the CV-picture. This is impossible in real world but really cool.

CV's, Control points, Curvature plots are the best things you have in software regarding surface smoothness diagnostics. Unfortunately designer doesnt want to know about this, and they are into sahded things. thats cool for checking balance of porportions and stuff. for surface quality ist crap.

At the end i say this: it opens your eyes when you can see the milled result of your digital NURBS model. Here you learn the most.

good luck