Graphical User Interface

The main heart of a CAD/CAM system is the solid model of a cast product. The reason for this is the approach of solid modeling of castings helps to achieve various advantages or benefits. Few to name in this are the speed and accuracy achieved for various tasks by using this approach in casting development is much improved.

It is essential thus to have wider knowledge about the techniques in the solid modeling of castings. Among these one of the important being graphical user interface, which is dealt in detail below.

Benefits of Graphical User Interface : In today's advancement the calculations for generating and displaying the solid model is not done by human. The standard geometric kernel is made used by all solid modeling software. This standard geometric kernel takes the pains of doing the calculations rapidly and accurately and gives the final generation and display of solid model. In this aspect the use of graphical user interface plays an important additional role.

The graphical user interfaces if used would help in user-friendly operations for users. That is the graphical user interface makes the application more user friendly by which users can give commands or operations they want the software to handle. Also by using graphical user interface users can give their needed inputs and get outputs generated by software, which they need to only view.

By using graphical user interface user can generate a new model or go for modification or updating an existing model. It is also possible to set coordinate axis and planes and generate models with the features needed by users with functions to be performed by the model also generated with users needs.

The appearance of output model can also be generated as users needs by using graphical user interface. To name a few in this direction are user can get transparent view, shaded appearance of model, isometric, close-up and so on as their choice and preference by giving commands and functions to software by use of graphical user interface.

The benefit of graphical user interface does not stop with this. By saving the inputs and specifications in a file it helps the file to be used across various applications by other users who needs the same format. This help in time saving and usage across various applications.

Technology and Usage in Graphical User Interface: The software used for solid modeling can have graphical user interface for both UNIX and windows based operating systems. The approach started its operations with UNIX systems and since many of the systems in today's technology are windows based the approach took its presence in windows based also making its usage wider and popular among users.

There are various ways in which user interface communications can be carried out. Some to name are through command lines, menu driven, pressing of icons provided and so on. The command driven was the oldest method of communication in which users have to have knowledge of commands to input. This was used with older DOS and UNIX systems. However since command remembering is not possible for all users the later easier user interfaces like menu driven, icons came up. The pull down menu may have main menu with number of cascading sub menus in it.

The icon based user interface is one in which images are placed with buttons and the click of a button by user would perform the action by executing the function associated with that icon.

Some latest application of solid modeling has all methods of user interface provided to make usage easy of all users.