Using spreadsheet cell with PArt WB thickness tool

[drmacro]

HI,

I set up a spreadsheet to control the parameters of box to be 3d printed.

When I got to applying the thickness to the box I found out that I could not use a value from the spreadsheet by entering "=" in the Thickness field of the thickness task dialog. But after clicking ok in the thickness task dialog and then specifying the spreadsheet value in the Value property in the Data tab when the thickness is selected in the feature tree does work. Is this by design?

Also, short of actually modelling the walls to create a shell, is there a way to have the Thickness tool not create a new entity in the body? Or is this just the way it works? Not that it's a problem really, just curious.

And, if the source entity for the Thickness is filleted before the Thickness is applied, is that likely to be a problem for later constructs.

I now see that the thickness is not part of the body and I can't model more "stuff" onto the insides of the shell. Did I miss a step or misstep?

[NormandC]

Is this by design?

Probably rather an oversight.

Also, short of actually modelling the walls to create a shell, is there a way to have the Thickness tool not create a new entity in the body?

I'm confused by this statement. If you're using Part Thickness as your topic subject specifies, then the Thickness "entity" would be created outside of a PartDesign Body. If you're working in PartDesign with a Body, why aren't you using the PartDesign Thickness tool instead? In that case, it would create a feature inside the Body (only PartDesign tools can create features inside a Body). In a Body, you do not have separate "entities", you have features, which are successive operations representing the new state of a same and unique model. For more info about this, have a look at feature editing.

Note: the PD Thickness parameters task dialog allows linking an expression to a spreadsheet cell.

[NormandC]

issue #3894

[drmacro]

If you're working in PartDesign with a Body, why aren't you using the PartDesign Thickness tool instead?

Because I hovered that and misinterpreted the tool tip...

[NormandC]

Yeah, I'm not crazy about the tooltip ("Make a thick solid"), nor about the name of the command istself, which is really not clear. I believe it is copied from the name of the command in the Open Cascade (OCC) kernel. Most commercial CAD programs on the planet call this "shell", or a variation on the term (thin shell, thick shell...). In Solid Edge, it's called "Thin Wall". Calling it "thickness" is utter silliness IMO, because on the face of it, any solid already has a thickness. What the command does is not "adding thickness" to a solid, it's actually hollowing it out.

Since the command is named "thickness" in the source code itself, I doubt we'll ever be able to have it renamed, unfortunately.