Defeaturing Tools: how to edit a STEP model (parametrically)

[easyw-fc]

Hi Maurice,
thank you so much. What a great and powerful workbench.
You are a great programer.
Best regards
Wilfried

thank you for your kind words, but I just discovered some interesting Open Cascade primitives for Shape Healing:
https://www.opencascade.com/doc/occt-7. ... aling.html
Probably there is little audience in FC for Shape repairing... most users just create the models from scratch...

Looking for a new mission?
A good face selecting tool is missing, from my point of view.
First a rectangel selecting tool that select the faces in front and not behind.
In Freecad exists something similar (the box select tool) to color single faces.
And then a selecting tool with inner and border faces. Imagine you have a part with many faces inside, lets say 138 faces, and outside is a border with just 12 faces.
In Creo you select the shift key to start this operation and first select one inner face, then you unselect the shift key, you press the shift key again and hold it, then you start to select the 12 outer faces. Unselect the shift key and voila all inner faces are selected for a copy or something else.
An easy example a box with one face thickness. Inside you have 5 faces, the border is just one face.
In Creo this tool works parametric. That means if you change the order in the model tree and add faces inside, the selecting tool will add them. It's explained on page 12 and 13 in the quick reference card:
http://www.cad-resources.com/files/Creo ... erence.pdf
By the way a edge chain / set selecting tool is also missing. The path-workbench has such a tool, but it's not working in other workbenches, I don't know why:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 38#p215938

I will have a look at path-workbench, but I'm very weak in Coin coding and I suspect this is much related...

Maurice

[easyw-fc]

I've added a new Gui, with small graphic buttons.
Few new features (getting some ideas from Salome repair tools):
1) 'Sew' a shape
2) Get and Set shape 'Tolerance'

dng.png (44.07 KiB) Viewed 483 times

It still misses a little help description to explain the way to work with the features.
Anyway, each button has a Tooltip to help in using its function.

[NormandC]

You created a page on the wiki:

Defeaturing Workbench

It's good, but there are a couple of problems.

• The following header has no purpose, since the name of the workbench is already implied by the page title showing at the top.

  Code: Select all

  == FreeCAD '''Defeaturing WorkBench''' ==

• It looks like you manually added <!--T:1--> translation units? You should not do that, they will be added automatically once a page is marked for translation. The steps are detailed here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Ext ... on_example
  Basically:
  1. You add <translate> </translate> tags
  2. You save your changes
  3. Then a "Mark page for translation" link appears on the page. ---> Only a wiki admin will see this and the following steps.
  4. Click on the "Mark page for translation" link
  5. A page appears showing all the translation units that will be added
  6. The bottom of the page has a button labelled "Mark this version for translation"
  7. Clicking that button enables translation and adds the translation units to the original page.

The list of wiki admins that can mark pages for translation is here: https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.p ... roup=admin

[easyw-fc]

It's good, but there are a couple of problems.

• The following header has no purpose, since the name of the workbench is already implied by the page title showing at the top.

  Code: Select all

  == FreeCAD '''Defeaturing WorkBench''' ==

fixed

[*]It looks like you manually added <!--T:1--> translation units? You should not do that, they will be added automatically once a page is marked for translation. The steps are detailed here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Ext ... on_example
Basically:

1. You add <translate> </translate> tags
2. You save your changes
3. Then a "Mark page for translation" link appears on the page. ---> Only a wiki admin will see this and the following steps.
4. Click on the "Mark page for translation" link
5. A page appears showing all the translation units that will be added
6. The bottom of the page has a button labelled "Mark this version for translation"
7. Clicking that button enables translation and adds the translation units to the original page.

[/list]
The list of wiki admins that can mark pages for translation is here: https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.p ... roup=admin

I went to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Ext ... on_example
and I found:

Step 3: Enabling translations
After saving the page, you will see a link at the top of the page saying "Mark this page for translation" - or "This page contains changes which are not marked for translation." if you are not a translation administrator. If you are a translation administrator, then click on the "Mark this page for translation" link.

Because I'm not a translation admin, after a rework (fixing my mistakes), I get only "This page contains changes which are not marked for translation."
I think I can leave now everything like that to translation admins...
Thx for your suggestions.
M

[NormandC]

I think I can leave now everything like that to translation admins...

Yes, that's what I meant to say; but did you add the translation units yourself? I thought you did, because <!--T:13--> is used twice.

[easyw-fc]

I think I can leave now everything like that to translation admins...

Yes, that's what I meant to say; but did you add the translation units yourself? I thought you did, because <!--T:13--> is used twice.

I did because I copied the skeleton from an other my WB page. Now it should be cleaned, because I already removed the tags as you suggested in previous post.

[chrisb]

I have marked the page for translation.

[freecad-heini-1]

Hi Maurice,
in the German forum user polymer created a video to show defeaturing tools in a closed source software called Cimmatron. Very powerful tools as well as the face selecting tools I would like to see in Freecad.
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 69#p247269

What about a removing fillet tool as introduced on the OCC webpage?:


https://dev.opencascade.org/index.php?q=node/1211

More examples here:
https://dev.opencascade.org/doc/overvie ... efeaturing

Best regards
Wilfried

[easyw-fc]

Hi Maurice,
in the German forum user polymer created a video to show defeaturing tools in a closed source software called Cimmatron. Very powerful tools as well as the face selecting tools I would like to see in Freecad.
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 69#p247269

this can be achieved in a tricky way with FC and Defeaturing WB
I'm using the Face Box selection for coloring faces and I add the selection to my tools...

phpBB [video]

What about a removing fillet tool as introduced on the OCC webpage?:
....
https://dev.opencascade.org/index.php?q=node/1211

More examples here:
https://dev.opencascade.org/doc/overvie ... efeaturing

Best regards
Wilfried

This will be available asap FC0.18-14174 will be deployed ... @Chris_G defeaturing routines have just been merged...

phpBB [video]

FC defeaturing in action ...

[freecad-heini-1]

Hi Maurice,
thank you so much for the vids, great to see this helpful tools.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/easyw ... amfer.webm
Video upload to githubusercontent instead of Youtube, good idea.

Concerning the box selecing tool from set colors, I know this, but there is an big difference, it selects faces in front and below, the face selecting tool from Cimmatron and Creo detects what in front and what below.
But it's a usable hack, better than no solution.