- [Instructor] There are various settings
that we need to discuss before you actually generate your
first curves and surfaces within Generative Shape Design.
I'm going to click on one of the icons, just join
and I want you to notice at the bottom
we have what's called a merging distance.
This is part of Generative Shape Design
with those really advanced surfaces
they can create very, very math intensive surfaces,
so everything is based off of a tolerance,
what tolerance are we going to design our parts to.
So if I generate a curve and I already created
various surfaces off of that curve,
what is the tolerance to that curve?
Or if I have two surfaces in this case, or two curves
that are supposed to share an edge, or boundary.
What is the allowable distance
between those two curves and surfaces?
This is called the merging distance, this is very important.
Depending on the company you're working for,
and the type of data that you're providing,
you may need to keep this very tight.
Here you can see I have it set to one micron,
.001 of a millimeter, extremely tight tolerance.
If you have a global tolerance
that you know the organization that you're with works to,
you are going to want to go into tools, options.
Under tools, options, you have what's called shape,
under shape you have generative shape design.
Here you'll notice the input parameters under general.
This is your default tolerant modeling,
so as you are generating things,
what am I allowed to deviate from,
as far as off of a curve, or off of a different surface.
The tighter you make this,
the more complex the curves and surfaces will be.
The looser that you make this,
chances are the surfaces and curves
will be a little less complex,
and you may end up with some grade
of deviations at surface boundaries,
but again depending upon what you are doing,
that may be perfectly acceptable.
And again this is at a micron currently, which is basically
imperceptible to the human eye and human touch.
So some companies will loosen this up,
they will bring this up to let's say .005, or I've seen .01
and in some cases even a tenth of a millimeter.
And if you're dealing with extremely large parts,
with a large amounts of tolerances that are allowable,
then opening up the merging distance
is going to be a much more allowable thing.
One of the things you need to be careful of is
if you are bringing data in
from other CAD systems into CATIA,
a lot of those of the CAD systems do not work with
as tight of tolerance as CATIA,
so you may have to loosen that tolerance up a bit
in order to get things to join.