Hello,

Here's a little MMCX connector, not the smallest but getting there. Instead of Flow I used Twist to make the knurling. Is it tutorial worthy? Thanks.

Another nice coax connector!

If you ever do a tutorial, I think some of us might like to see a tut on how you use Flow to get the diamond pattern grip surface in place.

Hello,

For some reason the Flow command to do the knurling is not working as well as it did in a previous beta. I'm getting some very weird problems now with stretching, edges not lining up and such and it seems to be running slower. I've found that the Twist command is a bit more suited now to making knurling at this point but also have a few issues with that as well when cutting away surfaces, such as missing faces and bad Booleans that clear up once I shrink the surfaces, and then crop up again. It's kind of hard to pin down since the errors are not kicking off reports to email, but the Twist command is what I'm using at this point with the current beta.

Hi OSTexo - can you please post or e-mail me an example file that doesn't work with Flow as well as it did in the previous betas?

That will give me a test case that I can work on to see what change made a difference in behavior and to see if I can tweak it to work better.

- Michael

Hello Michael,

The file is quite large, around 30MB in size. That's for the Flow example. My problem is I never bothered to take screenshots of the old Flow operation, I can only provide the screenshots of the new. Is this OK? I could provide the file for download to you, I can email the link as an option. The Twist example is even larger around 50MB, but there is no questions that the Flow method is faster, if I throw fillets into the cutting object using the Twist method it takes about 30-60 seconds to Boolean each pass. Even then the Boolean doesn't always work, it leaves some material in the base solid that should be removed, but it looks like I'm really stressing the system at that point, and it's beta so I'm not complaining, just informing in case it crops up again somewhere else. Thanks.

Hi OSTexo - are the knurls a whole lot of separate individual pieces?

Is it possible for you to reproduce the problem with some small number of them? If so then could you please delete 95% of them or so to get a lighter weight file and then e-mail that one to me?

Or is the knurling one single enormous thing that's being deformed?

If it's possible it's better for me to receive example files (smallest that reproduces the problem is best) rather than screenshots, since with an example file I can test with it and also test what happens when I make changes to how things work.

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi OSTexo,

If you ever want to post files up to 100 MB, with no questions asked, I use MediaFire. No sign-up either. :-)
http://www.mediafire.com/

Hello Michael,

Let me try to recreate it with one row. I'm flowing hundreds of objects, not one unified surface. I'll send over a smaller file, thanks.

Hello,

Smaller number of objects works all the time, I'll send over a base file with one row of objects and you are then able to duplicate the objects to test out? I'd like to be able to use Flow since it does seem to be much faster and involves less steps. I am getting some weird Boolean errors as well using Twist, maybe the solid to be cut is too complex for the cutting object? I did find the simplest way to get a decent result that involves more than one cutting tool. When using this method I find that it really matters which cutting tool you use first. If you switch the procedure around I get all sorts of Boolean incompleteness which baffles me and probably includes some sort of math that is way above my head. Thanks.

Hi OSTexo,

> Smaller number of objects works all the time, I'll send
> over a base file with one row of objects and you are then
> able to duplicate the objects to test out?

Yeah that should work.


> I am getting some weird Boolean errors as well using Twist,
> maybe the solid to be cut is too complex for the cutting
> object?

It's probably something more like edges that go through the deformer engine are not getting a tight enough accuracy between their UV parameter space curves and their deformed 3D edge curves. If that's the case then I may need to change how edges are deformed.

I'll probably need some test cases in order to make changes like that, to make sure that I'm actually solving the problem and not actually making things worse instead.

- Michael