Feature-based method has been successfully applied in several fields of manufacturing. However, most of the applications use the solid modeling method that cannot meet the requirements of a product design that needs a free-form surface or a complicated surface. A sports shoe is one of the products that need a complex surface to design its sole. In addition, sport shoes are rapidly changed with their styles based on customer and market demands. Thus, the design must be flexible enough to meet those demands particularly when a short lead time design is concerned. Previously, shoe designs have been created by using a commercial standard CAD/CAM system. Surface modeling is normally selected. However, it is time consuming and not competitive. This paper presents a new method of a sport shoe sole design using the hybrid features of surface and solid modeling. Primitive features are prepared in the library, which is written in C of Cimatron API. The user can select and modify before joining them together to create a new shoe sole model. This system has the ability to extend sizes or grading in 3D automatically. The system was tested satisfactorily. Design time is saved 35.388% by average with a single piece design, whereas 88.42% can be saved when 12 sizes grading is performed.
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