Hi everyone -
Just trying out a trial and wondered, as a solidworks user a long time, is there any way to go back in the history and change some features?
I created the starburst in the tutorial, and wanted to go back and make some changes to the "legs", but I can't seem to access the spline and the points to change it. Any help would be appreciated.

Ken

Hi Ken, there is a limited history function, if you create a surface from something like extrude, sweep, or revolve, if you then edit the input curves that went into that surface the surface will update.

But once you do certain operations like booleans, the "history chain" will be broken and you won't be able to do that kind of edit after that.

In the future I do want to make the history function deeper to handle this kind of stuff, but it's a pretty complex piece of work to implement that well since it involves storing a whole lot of previous versions of objects and that can make for a lot of data to process.

Usually in MoI the main way to change things later on is to just redraw things. MoI is sort of based around the idea that it's quick to draw things so this is often not such a big deal.

But if you really need to make that kind of deep history edit you would probably be better off doing those models in solidworks rather than in MoI.

MoI is not really designed as a "drop in" replacement for solidworks really, MoI is more focused on having a lightweight feel and making drawing things happen in a quick and fluid way so it's more about kind of quick sketching things and not so much about making large parametrically driven assemblies.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the explanation. So for instance, if I were to import that starburst from the tutorial into solidworks, would I get a feature tree that I could isolate say one of those "tentacles" and make some changes to it? What would be the best way to export, iges?

Ken

Hi Ken, you won't get a "feature tree" when transferring using standard file formats like IGES or STEP but you can use the so-called "direct modeling" features that many CAD programs have to edit faces in various ways like moving or rotating planes, changing hole diameters and stuff like that. Something like a tentacle arm is not going to fit well with that kind of direct modeling toolset though, it's not likely that it will be able to reverse engineer how that particular surface was created. So for editing a tentacle you're probably looking at just drawing a brand new shape for it rather than doing any editing for that particular case.

> What would be the best way to export, iges?

It's probably better to try STEP first - IGES will also work but the IGES file will contain a bunch of individual separate surfaces and the receiving application needs to sew them back together again into a solid, which it probably will do ok but with STEP format the joining information comes through as part of the file.

- Michael