It’s Thanksgiving, and in this Video Tech Tip, TriMech Application Engineer Laura Weismantel shows us how she used SOLIDWORKS and NESTINGWorks to help her create these awesome DIY table settings. This is a great example of how SOLIDWORKS and NESTINGWorks team up to efficiently create your designs.

Laura starts with a sketch of the turkey body using the style spline tool. The style spline is still a relatively new tool in SOLIDWORKS that allows you to draw splines via the control polygon instead of directly drawing the spline itself, which can sometimes be tricky and downright cumbersome. Style splines are the easiest way to draw splines in SOLIDWORKS.

For the next part of the turkey, Laura shows us how the sketch picture can be used as a template to trace over. Sketch pictures are easy to size by dragging the corners or even inputting dimensions using the dimension scale tool. To combine the two pieces of geometry into one shape she uses the trim tool to finish off the turkey’s body.

Now that the 3D shape is made, Laura needs to turn that into flat 2D geometry, so she can easily cut it out of paper. The flatten surface tool is used to flatten or unfold surface bodies. With one flat pattern created, NESTINGWorks is used to help maximize the stock material. It helps to lay out the shapes to get the most turkeys out of the card stock.