Full Version: Sheet metal in V4

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For information also , a part of in my workflow:

Chri

Image Attachments:
SKETCHUP CONCEPT.jpg 

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@Chri
Why there are not "temporary" violet rectangular volume ?
Because you make a direct PushPull on the piece ?
Because sometime, maybe there will be more easy to put this temporary box and "pushpull" it than try to find a face to extrude! :)
(no need to orbit in complex position)

And for the Red Blue Yellow : it's allways the same or depending of the "Thickness" of the piece?
(have they same thickness ? )
There is no measure of the thickness of the principal piece! :)

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Hi Mik and Chri, those are some potential things for the future. At the moment I'll see about doing a face rotation helper.

- Michael

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Hi Michael,

I test your workfow vs mine, and mine is a little bit faster (10 vs 9 clicks) to get the result i need.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

Carlos

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Hi Carlos, the thing is that the workflow that I was describing will be much easier for me to automate, so if it produces the result you need tomorrow I will work on a script for you that will remove several of the steps to make it faster.

For example all the points for the rotate axis except a single one for the actual rotation I think should be possible to get set automatically coming from the edge you select. At least that would be the idea.

But that will only be relevant if those manual steps do work to generate your desired result.

- Michael

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Ok, thanks a lot.

I was just testing the both workflows looking for some speed gain, and learning something new on the way : )

Carlos

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@PILOU ,
Merci PILOU

Q : question
A : Answers


Q : Why there are not "temporary" violet rectangular volume ? ...
A : because it's easy to draw with M.O.I


Q : And for the Red Blue Yellow : it's allways the same or depending of the "Thickness" of the piece?
(have they same thickness ? )
A : about thickness : when you draw a sheet metal part , all the part has the same thickness.
( if you need somethings else , you need to weld a new part ).

A : about radius : when you bend a sheetmetal part , you need 2 parameter only , choose between inter radius , exter radius , thickness

A : you need also the angle !


Q : There is no measure of the thickness of the principal piece!
A : thickness and material are often write on the sheet or the part list


Chri

Image Attachments:
PARAMETER.jpg  tutorial_simpledrawing_zoomtitleblock.png 

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....those are some potential things for the future

Michael , Many thanks to spend time for us
Congratulations

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@Chri
Ok ok...
About Radius internal and External
They have same Center?
It's always Circles?

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Hi Carlos, please give the attached plug-in a try, instructions for installing a plug-in are here: http://moi3d.com/faq#Q:_How_do_I_install_a_plug-in_script.3F

Set up a shortcut key with this new command RotateAndExtrudeFace on it.

Select your face and then push your shortcut key, or you can also select it after you push your shortcut key, in which case you'll only need to do one click to select it (no "drill in" needed, the drill in is automatic since it knows it is only trying to select a face at this point).

Next step is to select one of the edges of the face which will be used as the pivot edge.

You will now be in the equivalent of the RotateAxis command but on the 4th point pick in there, the first 3 points will be already set up from the face's edges. So as you move your mouse around you will see the face being rotated. It will also not be necessary to do the last right-click that you needed in RotateAxis to end the "make copies" mode, this version exits the rotation part after you've done one click.

After you pick the point to set the rotation, the face will be selected and it will run the extrude command next automatically. If you don't want extrude to run automatically, remove the line from RotateAndExtrudeFace.js near the end that says moi.command.execCommand( 'extrude' );

You can also type in an angle value to do the rotation instead of picking a point but one tricky thing with this is which direction is a positive angle and which is negative will be determined by the orientation of the edge, if you want to do this you'll need to move your mouse first and observe which direction is reading as positive before knowing which direction to use.

Hope this helps streamline your process!

- Michael

Attachments:
RotateAndExtrudeFace.zip

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Wonderful streamlined script Michael !!!!

Thank you very much!

And it seems also easily customizable...

Best,

- Marco (mkdm)

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Hi Michael,

Thanks a lot for the script. It saves me a lot of time. So, its great!

I've a little question (also don't want to push it too much):

Instead of 'select one of the edges of the face which will be used as the pivot edge' its possible to selected 2 paralel edges of the face?

The idea is to offset the rotation axis.

Anyway, i'm happy with this script. Hope it didn't took you to much time.

Thanks.

Carlos

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Hello Michael,

Maybe an image (attached) will show you better what i'm trying to say : )

This will place the rotation axis to the 'right' place, where i draw a construction line, and the Extrusion will begin from there.

EDIT: If the rotation of a face must be 'settle' in one single edge, this edge (axix) needs to be offset back by half of the distance between the 2 paralel edges.

Carlos

Image Attachments:
example2.jpg 

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Hi Carlos, please give the attached version a try, note that this version is named RotateAndExtrudeFace2 with a 2 on the end so you must also set up your shortcut as RotateAndExtrudeFace2 as well. On this one instead of selecting an edge the script automatically looks for parallel edges in the face and shows you the median lines between them. Then instead of picking an edge of the face you pick one of those median lines to be the rotation axis.

Also there was a bug in the first version script when the script gathered the end points of the boundary, just by luck the bug didn't happen to impact the functionality. But if someone wants to use this script as a reference for gathering the endpoints of a trimming boundary loop in the proper order, use the one in this script rather than the previous one.

- Michael

Attachments:
RotateAndExtrudeFace2.zip

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Hi Michael,

and good morning.

Thanks a lot for your scripts!

Just a side note :

> ...Also there was a bug in the first version script....

With this last version of the script, it seems that we lost the chance to select one of the normal boundary edges of the selected face,
because now it only permits to select one of the median lines between them.

Could you please create a combined version of the two scripts ?
That is, a script with an option to choose the working mode ?

I think that the overall workflow wouldn't get worse :

1) Select the face to rotate
2) The scripts will be executed in its most recent "mode" used.
3) Every time that we change the working mode, by selecting the UI option, the script resets its calculation and returns to the initial state,
that is, simply having the face selected and asking the user to select the appropriate edge or median lines.

What do you think ?
Is it feasible ?

Anyway...thank you very much !

Best,

- Marco (mkdm)

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Hi Marco, it's feasible but would require additional work... If you need the functionality of both versions then a simple way to get that without any more work involved is to just have both of them installed and set up 2 shortcut keys, one to call the original version and a second shortcut key for the new one. That's why I named the second one with a different name, so you could easily have both of them if desired.

If this was going to be one of the built in tools that was going to be frequently used by the average user, then it would be different, it would make more sense to potentially polish it up like you're describing. But it's not in that category, these are special purpose tools to be used for some very specific workflows. I'm happy to work on such tools to help save someone a lot of time, but I don't think that doing the combination like you describe would result in any actual time savings for Carlos compared to just having 2 shortcut keys. From what I can understand so far about his workflow I don't think he'll need to use the first version at all, but we'll see what he says.

It is just normal though that special purpose tools won't receive the same level of polish as ones that are used by a lot of people.

If it's mainly the bug in the first version that I mentioned that you're worried about, that bug does not happen to affect that version, it's only if you extracted the endpoint gathering part of that script and tried to use it for different stuff that the bug could cause problems. That's how I found out about it since the second version uses the endpoints for more detailed things and so the loop endpoint gathering had to be corrected for the second version to work.

- Michael

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Hi Carlos, I've also noticed in your examples that it might be most common for you to use the longer median with a rotation of 90 degrees for this stuff (I think you mentioned that at one point too).

If that's the case then please give the attached third version a try, note that its command name now ends with a "3" so make sure your shortcut for launching it matches that.

This version gets the rotation axis as a median line like the 2nd version, but it automatically selects the longest axis direction and also automatically rotates it by 90 degrees and so does away with even more steps, just select the face, run the command and bam! you're extruding at 90 degrees right away. I hope it will speed this process up for you considerably.

If you do need to sometimes rotate around the shorter axis or do rotations other than 90 degrees, then just have the 2nd version set up on a shortcut key as well so you can use it when you need to do those things.

- Michael

Attachments:
RotateAndExtrudeFace3.zip

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Hi Michael,

Its great. This is exactly what i need.

Only the angle rotation (on mouse pointer) behavior is a bit odd but i'm getting the hang of it.
It needs a bit of pratice, meanwile i just input a angle number, or try to snap to a vert of solid.
Maybe the cause is the central axis of the face is been used, instead of a face's edge.
9 times in 10 its a 90º angle i need of the selected face.

Thanks for this. I appreciate your support.

Carlos

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You're welcome Carlos - also don't miss version #3 above which automatically rotates by 90 degrees skipping the rotation step entirely, hopefully you should be able to use that version for your 90% use case.

For the version #2 rotation the mouse will track along a plane from the midpoint of the median line so try moving your mouse around that midpoint area rather than near one of the ends of the edges and it should probably make more sense.

- Michael

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Hi Michael, i missed your post about #3. I take too much time trying to write in english : )

The #3 is fantastic! It will speed up my worflow a lot, i mean a LOT!

Will use the #2 and #3 combined.

It shrunk a 9 steps workflow into 1, more than one hundred times a day, so the impact is huge. Amazing!

Thanks a lot.

Carlos

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