How to scale a solid object

[balden]

Hello all,

First and foremost: many thanks to everybody involved in the FreeCAD community: developers, tutorial makers, forumers. This software is just fantastic: thanks for making such a powerful tool available to everybody.

I'm sorry to ask because this is probably a very basic problem, but I could not find a solution after searching for a while, so here it goes: I would like to scale a solid object but I can't find the function to perform that operation. I found a chapter in the manual mentioning "box manipulators" for interactive scaling but this mention was in a grey frame labeled "obsolete" and I don't see those manipulators appear when manipulating the object (I can rotate and translate, however).

Here's my FreeCAD info:
OS: "openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64)"
Word size: 64-bit
Version: 0.15.3829 (Git) (Packman)
Branch: master
Hash: 234af5b27f997ee3e5dfa86e76ffe5521b31d532
Python version: 2.7.6
Qt version: 4.8.5
Coin version: 3.1.3
SoQt version: 1.5.0
OCC version: 6.7.1

Thanks in advance.

[NormandC]

Hello balden,

FYI, in CAD as a rule you should not scale a solid, but model it to the desired dimensions. There are very, very few use cases where scaling an object is required: for injection mold tooling for example.

There is no specific GUI tool for scaling as of now, you would need to do in in the python console. But, the Draft Clone tool produces a linked clone of your original shape, and the Clone can be scaled in XYZ separately.

[balden]

Wow, thanks normandc for the quick answer.
Draft Clone did the job indeed!
I have a rather complex model that's a tiny bit too small after 3D printing (does not fit).
Upscaling all dimensions from scratch from the beginning would be a little cumbersome (or I'm too lazy, let's face it...).
I could also do the scaling in the toolpath engine (Cura), but I was wondering whether such a function exists in FreeCAD.
Of course I understand it is not recommended to do this because I suppose a lot of the parametric stuff is lost in the process.

[NormandC]

Glad I could help!

Upscaling all dimensions from scratch from the beginning would be a little cumbersome (or I'm too lazy, let's face it...).

Ha! As goes the saying, I won't throw the first stone.

[jmaustpc]

There is also a scale tool in the Draft Workbench, it pretty much is just a different interface to a Draft Clone, but has some differences. Draft Scale sets the view mode to hidden on the original, which can be changed as it can also with the Clone. Once created you can change the Draft Scale object’s position and scale parameter values, as you can with a Draft Clone. In both cases the output object is linked to the original, so if you change anything in the original, that change will also effect the Clone/Scale object.

[mario52]

hi
here a discussion on the same subject with macro for clone or copy to scale
mario

[frankv]

I know this is an old thread, but I'd like to second @balden's request.

Like him, my interest is 3D printing. When I want to create a part to hold some piece of hardware (e.g. a bearing), I can download a file describing the bearing.

The obvious (to me) way to make a bearing mount is to Difference the given bearing object with the rest of the mount structure. But my plastic shrinks by 2% as it cools, so I need to increase the size of the bearing object by 2% before doing the Difference to allow for that.

Sometimes these external files are available as .FCstd files, but sometimes not. Sometimes, the only available file is a .STL mesh, so there may be no Sketch available to work on.

So, all in all, it would be a very useful feature for me (and, I expect, other 3D printer users) if there was an easy way to scale a solid object.

Frank

[NormandC]

But, the Draft Clone tool produces a linked clone of your original shape, and the Clone can be scaled in XYZ separately.

[Tamirov.ru]

If you wanna understand the base of the difficulties with scaling 3D-objects in FreeCAD and other CADs, you should be aware about «Topological naming problem»!
I'm Russian, recently I made the video about scaling 3d-objects in FreeCAD, but voice acting is in russian. So I made textual translation for this video https://forum.tamirov.ru/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=258&p=922

[openBrain]

If you wanna understand the base of the difficulties with scaling 3D-objects in FreeCAD and other CADs, you should be aware about «Topological naming problem»!

First, you just bumped a 5-year old topic!!!
Second, scaling has basically nothing to do with topological naming.