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Old 05-23-2015, 02:17 PM
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mbauer mbauer is offline
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REVCAD Sheet Lightning Pro 6

Received an email stating that RevCAD Sheet Lightning is on sale for $75 until the end of May 2015.

Decided to buy a version and download. Just finished downloading it and checked some of the library objects. Interesting program, looks like it will take some reading and practicing before I start designing models with it.

Here is a quote from the manual:

"
What is Sheet Lightning?

Sheet Lightning is a combined parametric and 3D design CAD program for designing and unfolding the following products from sheet metal/material (Lite version includes only parametric design).

Primary Product Design and Manufacture
1. Ducts and Flues
2. Chutes
3. Hoppers
4. Chimneys
5. Tubular steel products with tubular intersections.

The types of objects involved are:
1. Cylinders
2. Cones
3. Ovals
4. Rectangular sections
5. Adapters (all sections) - Square-to-round, Oval-to-rectangular etc.
6. Any oblique or skew.

Intersections can be:
1. Bends
2. Tees
3. Junctions/Crossovers

Forming (for example):
1. Elbows
2. Swept/Segmented/Lobster-back bends
3. Diverters/Breeches
4. Tubular steel nodes
5. Feeders
6. Spiral chutes.
7. One-Off/Bespoke designs

Secondary Product Design and Manufacture
The program has also been used very effectively for designing and manufacturing many other sheet and tubular material designs and products. Such products include exhaust manifolds, inflatable boats, inflatable bouncy castles, lamps shades and many similarly diverse products. Heavy engineering applications have included roof supports, tubular structural steel football stand supports, massive hydro-electric power station flow diverter conduit, and other major design projects.

Sheet Lightning in Education
The program has proved to be a powerful and valuable educational tool for schools and colleges. The main benefit for education is that the program is specifically aimed at the design of certain products. This means that as a CAD system it is far more productive (in its product area) than that of a general CAD system.

Secondly the designs created by Sheet Lightning can be physically created/manufactured using any sheet material, including the paper output directly to the printer. Students therefore have a unique opportunity of connecting their 3D design work to the real world by using the program to create anything from very simple, to very creative and artistic 3D designs and then actually creating the physical design using the printed output.

The 3D system in Sheet Lightning bears a close resemblance to many of the general 3D CAD systems on the market, but it simplifies 3D CAD in a way that is made possible by the specific product area for which is developed. It also has the advantage of having a dual parametric/CAD design environment, which means that even before any CAD skills are developed students can get useful and interesting output just by loading parametric design templates and typing in a few dimension values.

Sheet Lightning in Art
The most powerful specialism of Sheet Lightning is in its ability to create designs with complex intersections of many sheet material objects. This ability has proved to offer huge artistic potential. Sheet Lightning has an inbuilt and automatic facility for rendering 3D designs into solids with rotation/orbiting facilities. These images alone can be 'snapped' and used in presentations, but the 3D output can also be exported seamlessly to a CAD system and rendered with full control to produce some stunning images.

Special Product Design and CAD Application Development
Sheet Lightning has been created using Revcad Software's RAD CAD technology (Rapid Application Development of Computer Aided Design). This technology allows for the rapid development of bespoke CAD applications for new and specific product areas. The result being that Sheet Lightning has highly specific design capability for certain product areas that are either embedded in the main product, or released as entirely separate applications with just this capability."

Demo versions can be downloaded but don't have output capabilities enabled: Download area for Sheet Lightning CAD shareware

Here is the page to purchase if interested: https://shopper.mycommerce.com/checkout/cart/view

Just looking at available options, might be a useful tool for designing. Library has cones, tubes and others that can be used in model airplane and rocket design, unfolding capabilities and direct print to paper. Paper is just like sheet metal when forming, instead of rivets/welding we use glue.

Might be I just wasted $89 ( $75 for download + $14 for backup CD).

Will have to make time to learn this new program. Real busy right now with work and designing blueprints.

Mike
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  #2  
Old 05-24-2015, 10:50 AM
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mbauer mbauer is offline
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Basic fiddling today before getting started on chores around the house:
1) Opened a few of the library objects to check them out. Then tried the Cones, was able to select the library cone and imediately Unfolded it. About 0.2 seconds and it was ready to print.
2) Used the design tool and created a quick tube. Once drawn you just modify by typing in dia and length dimensions. Easy, easy. Unfolded it as well.

One thing I couldn't find was the "Un-Do" tool. Very popular in AutoCAD. Reading through manual to get basic understanding of tools and how to create additional parts for an airplane model. Wing airfoils and then connecting the wing to fuselage will be my first design issue.

Looks like I will need to export to AutoCAD to do paints and add tabs, not sure if Inkscape or Gimp will work for graphics yet. Sheet Lightning exports .DXF files.

Mike
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Old 05-24-2015, 04:20 PM
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How about using the keyboard short cut of "Ctrl+Z" for the undo function?
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Old 05-24-2015, 07:08 PM
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mbauer mbauer is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bigtodd View Post
How about using the keyboard short cut of "Ctrl+Z" for the undo function?
Worked! Found the short cut in the manual and tried it.

Painting might be an issue. Tried to open .dxf files to paint the unfolded part. Inkscape didn't show the part lines just the file page outline. ACAD opens with ease, but not wanting to use hatch patterns as paint. Very limited that way.

Does anyone know of a good free painting program that works great with .dxf files?

Guess it might be time to seriously look at Correl Draw or similar $$$ programs to paint the .dxf files.

It is incredibly easy to create nosecones and fuselages. For nosecones select a cone from the library and open it. Select it by clicking and type in three measurements:
1) top Diameter
2) Length
3) Bottom Diameter
Then just unfold, export to .dxf and you're done.

Mike

Last edited by mbauer; 05-24-2015 at 07:15 PM. Reason: Mention nosecone creation.
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Old 05-24-2015, 07:32 PM
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sgoti sgoti is offline
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Old 05-25-2015, 09:27 AM
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Status update:

Mike sent me a test file and I had problems opening it directly in Inkscape as well. Additionally, I was unable to directly open the DXF file in Adobe Illustrator (version CS3).

The workaround I came up with was to open the DXF in another program (in my case TurboCAD), export it from there as a new DXF file, and then open the new file in Inkscape, Illustrator, etc.

One thing I discovered when importing into Inkscape was that the object opened at a really tiny scale. resizing was no problem, but I would recommend making note of the original dimensions to make resizing easier.
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