Best Of

Recently we had a client commission a project from our company that was to be manufactured out of Corian countertop sheet goods and they wanted perfectly mitered corners on all of the parts with visible seams. Oh and they sent a concept model that had exactly zero right angles between faces. As I sit there mentally tallying all of the potential hours spent manually placing splitting planes or attempting to draw extrusions edge on I gave the sales team my overestimate for a go-away price to avoid the headache. Then the client paid it. So suddenly I was motivated to develop an alternative tool to avoid ever having to sketch a mitered joint ever again. Introducing Miter Warlock.

So imagine you were handed an object like this from a design team and asked to make it out of sheet goods. How would you panelize it? Does your approach scale to an object with hundreds of unique N-gon panels with random angles between every adjacent face?

Well if it does you should probably have told me about it before I wrote this script.

Miter Warlock takes a face or faces as a user input, finds the closest parallel(ish) face on the same part that lies behind that face, and draws a loft between the face pairs to split the parts into perfectly mitered panels. The input geometry can be drafted using whatever tools you desire, the only requirement is that you have some kind of shell-like geometry as a starting point whether that was made using shell, sweeps, 3 extrudes in a trench coat, whatever. There isn't even a requirement that each face in the part be a consistent thickness with the others on the same part. You just can't use b-spline faces for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

Since the resultant bodies are split, Ids are preserved for downstream operations. Don't put hole features in before this tool gets used though, I'm not checking for internal loops yet. Probably the highlight of the tool though is how it handles corner cases. Literal ones. This topological nightmare.

This is where the tool gets its name: loft features in onshape cannot cleanly resolve cases where the number of edges mismatch between loft profiles, and will draw spline faces in places where I need nice clean planar miters. Instead of studying how this problem ought to be solved methodically like a good wizard I started borrowing any available public features that do faceting things to facet my errant spline faces. I settled on Konstantin's Convex Polyhedron script as a faceting function for my script. I think that makes him my patron and my publishing this means I'm contractually bound to owe him a favor. At least I never need to draw a sketch for a miter again.

@MichaelPascoe You should see some of the cursed sheet metal forms I was able to birth into existence when I was testing the waters with the bounds of the scaling operation. If I'm reading the docs correctly these are affine transformations under the hood which is a much larger matrix of possible operations. If they ever expose the other values for me to play with you're gonna see some weird shit out of me.

Assembly mirror is coming — it's surprisingly complicated to do it well, but we think we have a good solution.

Michael_Bills said:

I agree, the way this is implemented makes my drawings look unprofessional.

After seeing loads of forum posts about the want for an assembly mirror, and lots of my team's gripes about wanting non-assembly mirrors that flip the original input parts instead of creating new ones to maintain the flow of downstream operations I decided to do something about it. This is not an assembly mirror feature. This is just a tribute.

I present to you Lefty Flip, which allows you to create left handed configurations of your parts while fully maintaining original part IDs, edge IDs, face IDs, pretty much everything I threw at it in one afternoon's worth of noodling. This means any mates you define at the assembly level for your right hand configurations of parts will also be defined for the left hand configuration when you change between them. Assuming you mated things any kind of reasonable.

To demonstrate I found a copy of a Fender Stratocaster assembly someone modeled and published on the public docs, but left out all the lefties.

And then applied the script to 3 part studios for the parts that would be flipped on a lefty guitar and none of the ones that wouldn't

Lefty Flipped.

Normally creating a left handed configuration of a product would require forethought and intent and good assembly structure and you'll still end up with a folder of suppressed mates at the end that you'll look back on later confused at how things are meant to relate to one another. Heaven help you if it isn't your model. Now you just need one feature and a configuration checkbox.

Just select the bodies you want to mirror in the part studio and optionally define a mate connector to center your flipping operation on. If nothing is selected it will use the part studio's origin as the center. It does do a left to right flip and not a front to back or top to bottom. Our company operates under Earth gravity but let me know if you work on parts for space and want the option for front to back or top to bottom flips and I might update this to add those at some point.

And because my team wouldn't live without it, it does sheet metal too. But only if you flip everything in the context at once because things were getting unstable when I tried to do only single pieces out of context. Probably that's your intent with a left handed sheet metal model in most cases anyway.

Now if only I was any good at drawing icons…