Just a post about surprise or maybe feeling proud, not sure
I remember 4 years ago when I got my very first experience with SolidWorks, my very first experience using CAD software. I probably had a relatively solid background due to high school, where I was enrolled in a Technical Drawing subject (using only paper and pencils), so I wasn't completely lost, and shortly after I got my CSWA Mechanical Design certificate! To be fair, I should have probably tried to get additional certificates since I have used SolidWorks to do everything I could think of, mainly parts for Formula Student cars and entire aerodynamic packages there.
Today, I had to model a UAV for a university project which was done by a classmate on XFLR5, which only allows exporting to STL format and not even all the aircraft surfaces at once, which is absolutely infuriating. Even more infuriating is that the sections were not circular; instead, they were supposed to be cubic B-splines, and XFLR5 displayed some nodes which one would assume were the control points for building that spline, but nope, for some reason they were not correct at all (I guess it was bugged, they have worked other times for me). So, I had to manually set some planes, add Sketch Pictures to each sketch, make a few guidelines to connect the frames, and badabim badaboom: one loft operation, closed the tail, knitted the surface (using the Create Solid option), and DONE. No warnings, errors, or complaints from the program.
To be honest, I don't completely know the purpose of this post. I guess you can see that a simple yet robust workflow allows you to use this program to model anything. It's not a sophisticated design by any means, not even the hardest thing I have done using SW, but at first, when I saw what I had to do and started doing several steps, I was scared something would fail at the very end, leading me to remake everything in some other way. But it's been smooth, and it might be inspiring for somebody 😄
