Each week we’re sharing a new tip with you here on the ‘Smack to help elevate your CAD game to a new level.

Our goal is to mix up the weekly tips to cover a wide variety of ground for using CAD effectively as a product design tool. Some weeks might feature basic form-building exercises to get your modeling muscles in shape and some weeks might feature rendering theory tips to make your sure your final projects are looking sharp.

While the bulk of the tutorials will utilize SolidWorks and MODO, we are always open to requests for other programs including Autodesk Fusion 360, Rhino, Adobe Creative Suite and others.

All of the videos come from our industrial design training site cadjunkie. Be sure to head over there for the entire archive of Hump Day tips and the expansive library of in-depth training content!

SolidWorks Hump Day Tips 07: Closing Surfaces in SolidWorks (Part III)

Summary

Some of the most difficult shapes in CAD are the ones that ‘cap’ or ‘terminate’ closed shapes. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at ways of terminating closed shapes using all of the various surfacing tools available to us in SolidWorks.

Last week we took a look at capping a shape that is all too familiar (but for good reasons) these days: the ‘squircle’. You’ve seen this ‘square+circle’ hybrid shape around on products including portable wi-fi hotspots and even in various Apple designs including the iPhone.

This week we’re going to take a look at a different kind of shape that is slightly more challenging: an ellipse! If you would like to follow along with the same file used in the video, we’ve included the project file below. Let’s do this!