This gives us an intuitive way to adjust the curvature of the conic without having to delve into which type of conic section it is, or what its mathematical eccentricity is.Īs the picture shows, if Rho is 0.5, then the conic is a parabola. If you imagine the conic as a rounded corner, then Rho is the ratio of the distance of the peak of the rounded corner to the sharp corner (D1/D2).
It builds much like a 3-point-arc, but instead of adjusting a radius value, we adjust a parameter called Rho (?). This allows us to create smooth, flowing blends, without worrying about wrinkles or dimples or other unruly spline behaviors.Ĭreating a conic in SolidWorks is very simple. The nature of their combined x-squared and y-squared terms means conics have a varying curvature, but do not ever change convexity like cubic splines can do. That means conics, and their resulting surfaces, are fast and lightweight for our computers too.
Many of us learned how to write and solve the formulas for conic sections while still in high school, unlike the higher math needed to manipulate cubic splines. These curves are called conic sections and you can read all about them on Wikipedia (which did not exist when I was in 10 th grade).ĬAD jockeys really like conics (as these curves have been called) because they are more interesting than arcs, while being less cumbersome than splines. SolidWorks 2013 introduces a sketch entity type that was once the soledominion of expensive Class-A surface modeling systems of yesteryear: The Conic Section.Īs I learned in 10 t h grade, if you take a cone and slice it with a plane, depending on what angle you slice it at you will get a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola.