nPower Software Releases Power Surfacing Version 4

Power Surfacing from NPower Software is a SOLIDWORKS plugin product to aid engineers and designers in designing parts in SOLIDWORKS. Power Surfacing enables the ability to design complex free form Class A surfaces in SOLIDWORKS, the company reports, adding that users will no longer have to “fight with patching a set of trimmed surfaces together to form complex curved shapes; manipulating Power Surfacing parts is as simple as modeling with clay.”

With the release of Version 4.1 the company has turned its Power Body objects into macro features so that they behave more like typical SOLIDWORKS features, and they can be created and edited directly from SOLIDWORKS assemblies. Users can now easily use Power Surfacing bodies as instances or references.

The 4.1 release is an upgrade for Power Surfacing. Here are some of the new features: assemblies: full support for creation / editing in assembly mode; macro feature: automatic updating / multi-body Power Bodies; conversion options: automatic trim & sew / large mesh support; and surface creation workflow: new paradigm for creating SubDs.

Power Surfacing now fully supports the SolidWorks Assembly modeling environment. You can now create and edit Power Surfacing features while in an assembly. It is possible to import reference constraints from other parts in the assembly.

Power Surfacing bodies are now macro features, which means they will behave like a typical SolidWorks features. You can also create multiple Power Surface bodies in a single part. Power Surfacing bodies will now automatically update as “standard” features in the feature tree do. When a Power Surface body in the feature tree is updated, it will automatically trim and sew the result (and make it into a sold body if it is solid). This automated process greatly improves the ability to update Power Surface bodies during edit and replay and thus facilitates a more reliable editing process.

The company is introducing advanced control over the process for converting Power Surface geometry into SolidWorks bodies. In addition to the typical subdivision levels, you can also increase the level of refinement, control the quality / accuracy, etc. There is a manual conversion option to explicitly control the number of subdivisions and refinements for the conversion process. For extremely large meshes (like ZBrush models), these numbers can be set to 0 / 0.

As a new method for creating geometry, users can now work in surface creation mode, extending and shaping surfaces on the fly. Also, there is support for a workflow for creating geometry from sketches.

For more info, visit NPower Software and IntegrityWare, Inc.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.