Coming from NX, Pro/E, Ironcad etc, I was a little unhappy with the way Shark appeared visually. It didn't look like an expensive CAD system.

Today I printed out the manual. While thumbing thru the manual guess what popped out? A way to change the edge colors! Woohoo... I promptly changed the solid edge colors to black. That, combined with a graduated background, makes a world of difference. They should have it that way out of the box!!! See attached picture. (Oh, surfaces still have white edges. I probably should change that too!

Any other suggestions how to improve the look and feel? And how do I get rid of that blocky feeling when I am rotating the model in space?

Mike...

FWIW, I am using this color combination, same as NX...

Mike...

I see some of you have experience with "heavy" CAD systems. First of all let me say that it is fine that you can set up the background how you like, and I would not like this option to be removed or changed, I think that is ok. Personally I most of the time work directly in isometric view and use a pure white background. I prefer black lines to be black on white and solids and surfaces coloured with custom material colours so it is easy to get a print or render preview. I never fancied the "acad" way of coloured lines on a black background..

Having said that I think one should remember that Shark FX is still very far from beeing an expensive or "heavyweight" CAD system, although you at times can do some complex stuff with it.


I do not think the main issue with shark is the visual appearance on your screen, it is what you can do with it!

And the main problem with Shark FX is still that it is not a stable program and it does not handle large files well.

Working with files that do contain a lot of elements and a mix of "lines/surfaces/solids" a.o., both imported from other systems and items created within Shark, can at times be a complete nightmare. You know there is only a matter of time before the program will crash, veru often destroying your file with it. For anything above a 100Mb file or so it seems the memory limit is kicking in fast and without warning Shark has crashed and your file is gone. So you have to save your multiple generations of a file every ten minutes and restart the program after a while. And opening and saving large files can take a looong time. And sometimes it will just crash when an operation does not succeed even on small not so complex files.

So until these issues get fixed, (which users in here have been pointing to for years on end, - and I know the people writing the code has been trying to solve), - it is no point trying to give the impression of beeing a "visually" expensive CAD system.

Fix all present problems first, then anything else!

Birger Kullmann
(Naval Architect)

Hi John


File menu--> Preferences or rt click on the Shark/Viacad at the top of main tool bar.

Select Display

In the drop down you can change edge color of solid & surface
Select user defined in edge color drop down menu
Goto color block click on that and select color in dialog
Then Apply



Regards
Jason