Visibility of all Subtractive tools like the subtractive primitives

[ModuloFS]

Hello,

i am new to FreeCAD and i have a question in terms of the visibility of the subtractive tools like pocket, hole, groove, loft and pipe. Is it anyhow possible to make such a subtractive operation slightly transparently visible as it is at the subtractive primitives?
So that i can see right at the beginning of the operation in wich direction for example my subtraction is done. Or at a subrtractive operation with a certain distance (subtractive pocket) i can see how much space i have to another face of the body for example. If the subtractive geometry is slightly visible, it looks more intuitive for me.

Thanks in advance!

[chrisb]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Pockets and grooves are immediately visible, at least as soon as you leave the input field (e.g. length of the pocket). Subtractive loft and sweep show a transparent preview of the object to be subtracted.

[ModuloFS]

Hello chrisb,

thank you for your fast answer!

You are right, but i can only see the suptractive area which are intersecting with the body. I can not see the "subtractive" volume which are present in the rest of the area where no body volume is present. An if i later place some body area in a forgotten suptractive volume (for example a pocket which i have done symetricaly to a plane and one side of the symetrical subtractive pocket is mainly in an area where at the beginning of the Design nothing was there) i can get strange behaviour.

[kisolre]

for example a pocket which i have done symetricaly to a plane and one side of the symetrical subtractive pocket is mainly in an area where at the beginning of the Design nothing was there

Then dont do it For this to happen unintentionally you must randomly click "Symmetric to plane" and then enter the double of intended pocket depth without realizing it ?!?
I think that since pad and pocket are simple prisms ant here are not a lot of parameters to adjust (length, symmetric, reverse) that they are directly applied and result is shown. For the other features the resulting tools have a lot more properties and in general applying them takes time so you have a preview to adjust everything before applying.

[heda]

+1 for having transparent tools in all circumstances, nothing beats that in user feedback of what is going to happen if you click ok.

I think it is one of those things that belongs to the category that if it would have been there for some years and then be removed, the result would be an outcry to put it back in.

[davidosterberg]

+1 for having transparent tools in all circumstances, nothing beats that in user feedback of what is going to happen if you click ok.

I think it is one of those things that belongs to the category that if it would have been there for some years and then be removed, the result would be an outcry to put it back in.

Implementation-wise it is almost trivial. It is a matter of changing the inheritance for the sketchbased features' viewProvider class a little and the rest will be automatic. The question is if it is generally desired. Myself I am not sure if I want the transparent preview (as it looks now) for Pad and Revolve. For these simple subractive tools it always seems to do what I want (for example the default direction is automatically set so that the direction goes into the material. The drawback of the preview is that you can see the subtracting body, but you cannot see how the result will be.

[drmacro]

why would being able to see void be helpful? It is void, it does not exist. by definition it is invisible.

if this is the way you model in your minds eye, then Part WB, where you need to make every solid and subtract it from others may work better for you.

when I put a block of material in the vice on my milling machine with the intent of cutting out a void, there is no imaginary material above the top surface of that block.

[davidosterberg]

why would being able to see void be helpful? It is void, it does not exist. by definition it is invisible.

Imagine an alternate reality, where Pad does not automatically suggest the direction to pad in. In this reality, the user would wonder why nothing is subtracted, until he tries to check the reverse checkbox. I.e seing the void makes it easier to spot why your result is not like you expected. As I said above though. I think Pad and Revoiution are simple enough so that it is not really needed.

[heda]

d.o. is on the point with the last post - in all honesty, I can manage well without it - so its not for my own sake that I'm +1.
however, I can well imagine that there is a noticeable amount of users that would really appreciate the visibility (and there are examples on this forum with questions why nothing happens when a pocket is made - in the wrong direction).

suppose it is possible to make it a preference setting,
or only transparent if the tool is not cutting through any other volume.

there is this saying...
for every customer that calls, there are hundreds not calling...

[chrisb]

Quite recently there was an unpleasent change, that pockets are not immediately applied as you type the length, but only at leaving the field. I haven't seen a discussion about it, and I can imagine huge models where it is sensible not to recalculate on every single keypress, but I never had any problems before. I used the previous feature quite often and only seen from my user's point of view it was idiotic to remove it.
If the old behaviour would come back as a preview I would appreciate it, although there would probably nothing be seen on a solid before applying it. Perhaps some (configurable) transparency automation could help.

The argument with the pocket going into the wrong direction counts as well. This almost never is a question when attaching sketches to faces, but it becomes immediately relevant, when sketches are attached to non generated geometry.