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When it comes to designing and optimizing your projects, efficiency is the name of the game. BobCAD-CAM is packed with powerful tools to streamline your workflow, saving you time and effort while enhancing precision. Let’s explore some of the most exciting features that will take your CAD experience to the next level.

Fundamentals

Construction Geometry: Your Design Assistant

The Construction Geometry function is an invaluable assistant in your design process. Easily toggled on or off via the interface, this tool provides helpful visual indicators such as horizontal and vertical alignment, intersection markers, tangency guides, and more. With just a click, you can activate or deactivate these indicators to suit your specific design needs.

Using Construction Geometry	Placement

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Modify Entities: Edit with Ease

Modifying your designs has never been simpler. Double-click any entity—whether a point, line, arc, or text—to instantly bring up the modify dialog. Adjust parameters and sketch handles effortlessly, ensuring precise edits while saving valuable time.

Double-click Entity	Select Modification Option	Quickly Extend

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Select Layer(s) Dialog: Simplified Layer Management

Organization is key in CAD, and the Select Layer(s) dialog offers a streamlined approach to managing layers. With comprehensive layer information, sorting options, and multi-layer selection capabilities, this tool keeps your workspace neat and efficient.

Select Layer(s) Dialog

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Selection Manager: Smarter Entity Grouping

Tired of reselecting the same entities over and over? The Selection Manager allows you to group multiple entities into a single selectable item. Save time by pre-selecting geometry for CAD and CAM operations, making your workflow smoother than ever.

Select Entities for CAD Function	Save for Automatic Selection	Instantly Select All Entities

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Alignment & Navigation

Align to Coordinate System: Streamlined Part Orientation

Easily align parts and geometry to any user-defined coordinate system for more efficient project setup. This tool ensures precise positioning, making transitions between different setups seamless.

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View to Active UCS: Simplified Navigation

Switching between coordinate systems can be cumbersome, but the View to Active UCS function aligns all views with your current coordinate system at the click of a button. This ensures seamless transitions and accurate design visualization.

Create Custom UCS	Adjust Views Normal to the UCS

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Feature Creation & Editing

Advanced Holes: Precision Hole Creation

Creating complex 3D holes is now easier than ever. With the Advanced Holes function, you can specify threading information, drill tip depth, and more. Simply select a location, input your values, and let the software handle the rest.

Select Point	Preview Updates with Parameters	Advanced Hole is Created

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Solid is Manifold: Ensure Model Integrity

Verify that your solid models are fully enclosed and free of unseen gaps with the Solid is Manifold function. A simple check in the Measure One tool confirms whether your model is ‘watertight’ and ready for further processing.

Solid is Manifold: False	Solid is Manifold: True

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Extrude Body Interaction: Controlled Solid Interactions

With the new Scope section in Extrude Boss, Extrude Cut, and Advanced Holes, you can specify which solid bodies should be affected by the operation. This ensures precision when designing multi-body parts.

Selected Bodies	All Bodies
Fixtures Affected	All Bodies Affected

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Surface Creation & Optimization

Skin & Ruled Surface: Achieve Flawless Surfaces

The Skin Surface tool allows you to create seamless surfaces using wireframe cross sections and rails. The Ruled Surface function, on the other hand, enables smooth transitions between two wireframe chains, optimizing surface quality when combined with splines.

Result A:

Cross Section Curves	Rail Curves	Result

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Result B:

Cross Section Curves	Rail Curves	Result

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Ruled Surface: Optimize with Splines

The Ruled Surface function creates surfaces using the selection of two wireframe chains with a linear blending between the entities of each chain. As with any surfacing function, you can also utilize splines for wireframe input when using the Ruled Surface function. By employing splines, you can achieve cleaner surfaces with smoother transitions between entities. Compare surfaces created with basic wireframes versus splines to witness the significant difference in surface quality.

Result A:

Basic Spiral	Preview	Result

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Result B:

Approximate Spline Applied	Preview	Result

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Workflow Optimization & CAD Management

Creation Tips: Enhance Workflow Efficiency

For a clutter-free workspace, create surfaces on hidden layers, ensuring precise alignment without interference. This method keeps your design environment clean while allowing for accurate modeling.

Creating a Hidden Layer	Working on a Hidden Layer

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CAD Tree: Ultimate Design Flexibility

Modify, reorder, and suppress CAD features with ease using the CAD Tree. This history tree enables quick iterations and adjustments, ensuring a dynamic and adaptable modeling process.

Model Requiring Update	Updating the Feature	Model is Updated

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Silhouette: Get the Perfect Outline Every Time

Extracting an outline from a 3D model used to require a lot of manual effort. But with the new Silhouette feature, you can automatically flatten a 3D part to create a 2D outline. This tool even works with tricky STL files, making it a huge time-saver!

Using the Project to Z Plane option in the Extract Edges function is useful, but produces curves for every selected edge, and it can take a while to manually whittle down to the desired geometry.

With the new Silhouette function, just select the geometry, set the direction, adjust options as needed and click OK. All the work is done for you! It even works with STL models!

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Entity Modification: Tweaks Made Easy

Why should modifying entities be harder than creating them? With the new Modification Doodad, simply double-click on an entity to instantly access all its modification options. This streamlined approach makes quick tweaks as simple as possible.

Double-click Entity	Select Modification Option	Quickly Extend

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Boos Your Productivity with BobCAD-CAM

BobCAD-CAM is designed to enhance efficiency and precision in your CAD workflow. By leveraging these powerful features, you’ll spend less time on tedious tasks and more time bringing your designs to life. Try these tools today and experience the difference!

 

Questions? Call Us to speak with a CAD CAM Pro!