From the course: Modeling a Motorcycle Engine with SOLIDWORKS

Design intent: A quick overview

- You will hear me talking about design intent from time to time, so I thought I'd briefly explain what it means. Considering the design intent of our model is a vital part of our modeling strategy when using a parametric software like SolidWorks. Since in short, design intent is understanding how our model will behave if we make dimensional changes to it, the better you understand what changes could be requested after your model is complete, the better you can capture these design intents upfront, which will save you a ton of time down the track. To illustrate this I have prepared a simple example. We have a base feature, a boss and a boss hole. The scenario is that in our design it has been communicated to us that the final position or placement of the boss is not yet confirmed. I should thus ensure that if the boss position is changed, any affected features behave as expected, which in our case would be the boss hole. Design intent is captured in how we have applied sketch relations, dimension and/or equations to our sketch or in our features. To illustrate, if we move the boss we can see that the boss hole is not behaving as would be expected since it is left behind and hence our design intent is incorrect. I'll do a control z to undo. Let's suppress the boss hole feature and unsuppress the cut/extrude to feature. So we can see how properly capturing our intent would look. Now let's move the boss again. This time we see that the hole moves with the boss and we have now properly captured the design intent. Practice understanding and establishing the design intent of your models irrespective of how simple the model may be so it becomes second nature to your modeling process. It does take practice and will take a bit of time to plan upfront, but the results are well worth it. I will demonstrate some of this approach during the design of the flywheel part and we may use the concept wherever we deem necessary during the conceptual design of our engine's internals. Now that we are on the same page regarding the user interface terminologies, some of my common workflow tools and what design intent is, let's get started on the modeling of our motorcycle engine internals.

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