I'm stuck. I managed to do something once and I'll be damned if I can figure out how I did it. I need to do it again and feel like a complete idiot.

I have the following curves:



Which I used to produce this with Sweep:



I needed to go back and resize the rail to get a different length of the two sections, and I can't do it. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Hi Scott, the problem there is that you're probably trying to sweep both of those profile curves all during the same single sweep operation.

That won't work for sweep because sweep only expects for there to be multiple profile curves when they are at different stations along the curve, like different shapes for the sweep profile to morph between as they travel along the path.

So sweep does not expect to get 2 curves at one single station like that, it does not not know itself how to directly make a hollowed out shape in one single sweep.

You will need to either 2 different sweeps to construct the outside and inside parts separately and then use boolean difference to cut the inner one away from the outer one, or sweep just the outer one and use Construct > Offset > Shell to hollow it out.

In the future at some point I would like to make it possible for sweep to do the kind of multi-profile hollowed out sweep all in one go like you are trying to do there, but for now at least it does not understand that and so you have to do 2 sweeps for that instead.

- Michael

Thanks Michael. Indeed I think I did use Shell before, thats the nudge I needed. As a feature request (and I don't know if the 3DM file format supports this), I'd love to be able to attach comments to an object (be it curve, solid, et al). Perhaps this is scriptable but I don't know if script's methods get called when objects are written out/read in.

In comments I could document the construction of my primitives or at least describe more about its use or even requirements for, in my case printing.

Scott

Hi Scott,

> As a feature request (and I don't know if the 3DM file format supports this), I'd love to be able to
> attach comments to an object (be it curve, solid, et al).

It's possible in the 3DM format to attach custom "user data" to objects, which will just be skipped by other readers that don't understand it.

But unfortunately that's only one small portion of what's involved in implementing something like this - maintaining the comments through different operations on objects and in particular planning and setting up the UI for such things can involve quite a bit of work.


> Perhaps this is scriptable but I don't know if script's methods get called when objects are written out/read in.

Right now there isn't any way set up for that to be scriptable.

One thing that might work for you currently though is to assign some sort of ID tag to a particular object as the object name, and then in a separate document written in a word processor or text editor, keep a paragraph of comments associated with that ID tag.

- Michael