Round-cornered rectangles: something even Sldwks doesn't have (yet)

andrew_troup

Solidworks eventually got around to including round-ended slots as a sketch feature, but there's one very useful class of shapes still missing:

Even ClarisCAD (which came on a couple of 1.44MB floppies, and ran on a Mac)  had round cornered rectangles. 

It's not just for drawing rectangular hollow section, handy as that is: a lot of cutouts for lightening structural elements are round cornered rectangles, and even more are round-cornered quadrilaterals. (A neat way to provide the second with minimal complexity would be to allow enabling or disabling the creation of horizontal/vertical, or perpendicular/parallel constraints, but retain the tangent constraints at the corners.)

And access hatches are generally round cornered, along with their associated apertures.

Another very useful option for OnS would be to permit the creation of round-cornered triangles with the same tool. In some contexts, these are even more prevalent for lightening structures. Perhaps the tool should create an n-sided, round-cornered polygon, with or without the constraints which make it 'regular' (Including separate provision for switching off the equal radius constraints for the corners)

3dcad

Geomagic Design (Alibre) has very useful tool including Round, Square, Obround, Rectangle, Rectangle with R corner, Single D and Double D shapes
These are created in certain dialogs and just click to add into any sketch, tool includes linear and circular pattern for all shapes - double clicking element in sketch opens the same dialog where it can be edited. All dimensions and pattern counts editable through equation editor too.

Add triangle and triangle with R corner and you would have pretty awesome tool.

Alan B

Nice, but I wouldn't use it every day....worth having if not at the expense of more important features..just my opinion.

andrew_troup

I agree, Alan.

I, too, would not wish to see this enhancement leapfrogging other, more fundamental offerings. 

There may also be other, more broadly applicable ways of arriving at the same sort of result:
perhaps "Select chain" followed by RMB "Fillet chain" (with an option to set all fillets equal)

The main thing is to eliminate the procession of precision mouseclicks involved in assigning all the tangency relationships one by one, twice per fillet. The thought of doing that on an iPad is even less appetising.

Solidworks eventually addressed this for complex sketches with "Constrain All", selecting the "Tangency" option, but it's not a timesaver for a single round-cornered rectangle.

jakeramsley

Andrew_Troup said:

The main thing is to eliminate the procession of precision mouseclicks involved in assigning all the tangency relationships one by one, twice per fillet. The thought of doing that on an iPad is even less appetising.

Sketch fillet automatically applies the tangency constraints.  As long as you don't exit the fillet command, all subsequent fillets will be set equal to the first one.

andrew_troup

jramsley

Yes, thanks, my bad, it's only one click per fillet.... but it is nevertheless laborious on a long chain

Emm

I vote for rounded rectangulars. If you do not another button for it then how about combining commands? Like toggling fillet commant so that it fillets everything you sketch, be it with rectangular tool.