New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

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NormandC
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New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by NormandC »

Since I'm subscribed to the clone bazaar branch on Launchpad I receive emails for each commit. When I saw the commits for those two new tools I couldn't wait for the PPA to update and compiled from source.

So, in short: WOW! Thanks a bunch Werner! :D

But I thought the main branch was in feature freeze pending official 0.13 release? I'm not complaining though :mrgreen:

I confess the options are a little obscure for me at the moment, I'll test further.
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by NormandC »

It is very cool that the Part Offset works on surfaces and solids. :)

P.S. I created a separate topic in the developers corner to report bugs.
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by NormandC »

I decided to have some fun with the Part Thickness feature and modeled a very quick and basic truck cab. It is not to scale, sketches are unconstrained (gasp! :o ) I know, lazy but I was too eager to use the thickness tool for something fun. :mrgreen:

I've been wanting to model something to have 3D printed by an online service, and was thinking of doing a toy car or something that I could give my 4-year old nephew (so he can destroy the $30-50 thingy in 10 minutes :D ). The thickness tool may be very useful indeed.

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wmayer
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by wmayer »

But I thought the main branch was in feature freeze pending official 0.13 release? I'm not complaining though
Is it? Anyway, these two tools do not introduce any regression and they are just a GUI interface for the OCC algorithms we have a long time on board.
I confess the options are a little obscure for me at the moment, I'll test further.
I don't know either what all the options are good for. They are part of the OCC API and I just put them into the GUI 1:1.
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NormandC
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by NormandC »

A question: in the CAD software I use at work, there's a "thicken" command to give thickness to a surface or a shell and transform it into a solid. The edges are extruded normal to the surfaces. Could Part Thickness be eventually modified to add this functionality? Or does the OCC API not support this?

Those pesky end-users are never happy. :mrgreen:
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by wmayer »

No, the OCC algorithm doesn't directly allow this. The thickness algorithm expects a solid as input and a list of faces which will be removed. However, it's possible to give only a face or a shell as input or an empty list of faces to be removed but then the result is the same as you get with the offset.

So, if I got you right then you want to create a solid out of the input shape, the offset shape and filling the sides. On the offset function there is a fill option which should do exactly this but until now it works for simple cases only. The biggest problem is to fill the sides. The thickness algorithm must do the same somewhere but I didn't find the relevant code section.
The edges are extruded normal to the surfaces.
The offset does it the extrusion as you need it? The actual extrusion algorithm in OCC works differently. There you can define only a single direction for the whole face.
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NormandC
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by NormandC »

Sorry, what I meant is, for example you can extrude a non-planar surface with the Part Extrude command, but the produced faces all around are normal to the extrude direction, not normal to the original surface.
wmayer wrote:On the offset function there is a fill option which should do exactly this but until now it works for simple cases only.
In the first version there was such an option but it seems to have been removed?
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by wmayer »

Sorry, what I meant is, for example you can extrude a non-planar surface with the Part Extrude command, but the produced faces all around are normal to the extrude direction, not normal to the surface.
Yes, I know. What it does is basically a movement and filling the adjacent edges with faces. Thus my question was if the offset function creates such a thickened face as you need it because the offset seems to do some kind of scaling.
In the first version there was such an option but it seems to have been removed?
No, it's still there. And as said it works in simple cases.
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by NormandC »

OK I'll check tonight and report back.
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Re: New Part Offset and Part Thickness tools

Post by kwahooo »

Case study:
Image

It seems that arc joins work for very complicated models, while intersection joins fails.
bica2.fcstd
Valid model
(213.45 KiB) Downloaded 181 times
bica.fcstd
Invalid model - intersection joins fail
(260.5 KiB) Downloaded 176 times
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