Feature script for Tube

wayne_sauder

Does anyone have a tool for tube routing? What I am trying to do is select points with various XYZ coordinates and the feature would make a straight run from point to point. Where the path passes through a point I need to be able to have precise control of a bend radius? This would be for a tube that is made on a standard tube bender. It seems all the workflows to do this are rather convoluted.      

eric_pesty

I think this might be what you are looking for:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/e9510fd9afb962d7ce9a8022/v/c0fbb184e647118cac3ae0ce/e/13b3e0761b89e89cacdcb732

S1mon

There's this one which creates 3D sketches with fillets. You can then sweep along that. Not necessarily ideal.
There's also this one, which has a slightly different workflow, and has some basic tube sweeping.

It sounds like a custom FeatureScript would be helpful, especially if you want to model any of the distortion that happens on a tube bender.

wayne_sauder

@eric_pesty
@S1mon
 Thanks, fellows, I actually had all these tools already, was just suffering from a mental block on getting what I wanted. 
 Your suggestions got the creativity going again. I do think that this could be a good candidate for a single feature script to do everything in one step??? Let me know if anyone writes such a tool.  

EvanReese

I've been wanting to "heavily reference" (steal) the code from Illya's Ortho Lines script to add the functionality to the Polyline mode of Freeform Spline, but haven't gotten around to it. I also plan on making a Profile Sweeper feature that would make it easy to sweep a round profile without needing to set up a plane, sketch, pick each edge etc. I want to take the opportunity to make a Featurescript tutorial out of it too, which will probably slow down the release of that feature though. Once both of those are done I think they'd be perfect for a workflow like you're describing.

S1mon

It's not exactly related, but I've often thought that it would be great to create a FeatureScript which does something like Alias's tubular offset (creates edges which are some radius from the current edge of a surface (or other edge/curve reference). This is effectively sweeping a circle along an edge/curve, and then creating the intersection(s). 

wayne_sauder

@Evan_Reese
Sound great keep me posted!!!