One of SolidWorks forte’s is “Delete nothing – Change everything”. As you might know, you can go into any sketch which is used for a feature, for example an extrusion, and if that sketch is unconstrained (no sketch relations or dimensions) or partially constrained, you can drag sketch elements and thereby change the shape of the sketch. Built into both SolidWorks 2D and 3D sketches is a clever and useful device called “Sketch Ghosting”. When moving a sketch element, SolidWorks retains, temporarily, a grayed ghost image of the sketch element’s original position before you moved it with your mouse cursor. Once you let up on your left mouse button, the ghost image is eliminated.
This is particularly useful for Consumer Product Designers when using sketch splines. Because of the sometimes ambiguous nature of splines and the fact that they are not usually driven with dimensions, it is very important when making changes to them, to understand the delta changes, sometimes very subtle. Ghosting of the spline helps the designer to understand the way that the spline has change when they move spline end or interim points.
Sketch Ghosting can also be very useful for simple line geometry. When used with the Move/Size feature in SolidWorks, you can double-click the sketch of an extruded cut feature and move the sketch with the ghost showing and when you let up on the left mouse button, the feature updates dynamically.
Fielder
Its interesting how functions like this come about. Years ago, SolidWorks had this functionality, but it was unintentional, as part of a graphics glitch. When the glitch went away, many of us were disappointed to see the functionality we had come to rely on just disappear. I'm very glad to see this return, intentionally this time!
Matt Lombard
Posted by: matt | October 11, 2006 at 01:22 PM