Although this article may appear to be discussing some completely unrelated topics at first, they are all interconnected which I will try to explain. Most of you know that engineers design products, or analyze systems, such as finite-element analysis (FEA), computation fluid dynamics (CFD), etc. What you may not be aware of it that we frequently use 3-D CAD/CAE tools for our work with the possible exception of some architects who seem to be still relying on 2-D AutoCAD. And yes, engineers that use 3-D CAD tend to think of themselves as more sophisticated than their 2-D CAD counterparts. Oddly enough, it seems as though more job openings are available using 2-D than 3-D CAD at the moment.

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For Pro-E, creating a round / fillet and selecting the conic option is probably the easiest method and the results will be close, but I would like to replicate the method in Pro-E similar to the method previously used in SolidWorks. The “delete face” tool in SolidWorks is useful for removing the face of a tangent fillet (C1) so that it can be replaced with a curvature continuous (C2) fillet. The technique of using a “Boundary Surface” was discussed in the previous posting, but how is this done in Pro-E as no exact equivalent exists for the “delete face” tool?

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When modeling a part in SolidWorks, there are specific situations where a curvature continuous (C2) fillet is desired, but a double hold-line fillet or the “atomic bomb” fillet (split line, delete face, and fill surface) is unable to be created. The delima is how to create these fillets using as few features in the model tree as possible.

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