Grid Extrude Custom Feature

EvanReese · June 2023

I've just released a new custom feature called Grid Extrude (get the feature HERE).

It works like the normal extrude feature, but extrudes a network of shapes like this. I made it mostly to make networks of drafted ribs to reinforce plastic parts, but there are other uses too. You can watch the video tour HERE. Give it a go and let me know what you think!

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/hc/oqy44lg7qb4t.png

MichaelPascoe · June 2023

Yes!

billy2 · June 2023

This is an iso grid right? NASA's strongest structure.

This is really nice, good job!

billy2 · June 2023

Darn!

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/7y/h5fkzfqgczkk.jpeg

Can you? They're a pain to construct manually.

shawn_crocker · June 2023

Another great one here!

glen_dewsbury · June 2023

Sweet

David_YL_Nguyen · June 2023

Cool feature!!!

NeilCooke · June 2023

Reminds me of one I did 3 years ago

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/2f390754b9d0cbf7c2dc4128

EvanReese · June 2023

@billy2
You can choose a triangle as the pattern, but it doesn't have the little holes at the nodes like the isogrid images I'm seeing

EvanReese · June 2023

@NeilCooke
yes indeed. The closer you look the more it will remind you of it, because the bbox and transform math of your feature was the basis for handling the transforms. Thanks for making it and putting it out there.

billy2 · June 2023

@Evan_Reese this was really fast to construct and analyse. Your script allows easy changes to grid size & direction to maximise strength to weight. Thanks.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/ne/xfbaxukzcwln.jpeg

EvanReese · June 2023

billy2 said:

@Evan_Reese this was really fast to construct and analyse. Your script allows easy changes to grid size & direction to maximise strength to weight. Thanks.

Yessss! I'd not thought to play with it this way, and I love it! If you wanna get even more flexible with it, you could configure it with variables so you can change it from the assembly

NewFatMike · June 2023

billy2 said:

Darn!

Can you? They're a pain to construct manually.

There is a public isogrid feature here, it's VERY cool!

Julia's Featurescripts | Isogrid (onshape.com)

EvanReese · June 2023

yes! Thanks, @NewFatMike. I knew I'd seen one somewhere and forgot where. Julia has a bunch of good scripts.

Chris_D_Mentes_001 · June 2023

There's no place in my industry where I'd ever get to use this but God Damnit its fu*n cool!

billy2 · July 2023

EvanReese · August 2023

V13 UPDATE:

I've been running into a number of bugs and limitations with this feature, as have others. I've re-worked a lot of it and I think it's much more usable now, and with better performance too.
Major changes are:

I totally re-worked how the grids are created. Now it creates a grid per input face, and the grid is much less over-built than previously, so it's more efficient. This improves performance, and also solves for some issues where the grid still didn't totally cover all of the faces, causing unpredictable behavior. This also means that certain odd cases don't impact performance the way they used to; for example, picking two faces far apart no longer produces a whole wasted grid between them.
Optional grid center point - Since the center location of the grid was somewhat arbitrary before, I've added the option to select any point or mate connector to position the center of the grid. This is made possible by the new grid logic. If a point is picked that isn't on the main plane, it will be projected onto it.
Optional grid direction - Similar to above, the direction can be somewhat arbitrary and unpredictable, so now a direction can be chosen. If a direction is picked that isn't perpendicular to the extrude direction, the closest direction is used anyway, giving a lot of flexibility about what can be selected as a direction.
Preview grid option which I'll personally use to make sure my setups are optimized well enough. Maybe other want this too.

bryan_lagrange · August 2023

@Evan_Reese this would be cool to demonstrate at an upcoming user group meeting.

EvanReese · August 2023

bryan_lagrange said:

@Evan_Reese this would be cool to demonstrate at an upcoming user group meeting.

I'm in. Let me know what you're thinkin'

bryan_lagrange · August 2023

Thanks Evan. I am hoping to get more details by the end of the week/ weekend.

dmitrii_nedealcov · April 21

Thank you!

robert_kvasov · August 2

Hi, excellent feature, just one request, as this is something I use all the time with regular extrude:
Can you add the "Starting offset" option?

robert_kvasov · August 2

Hi, excellent feature, just one request, as this is something I use all the time with regular extrude:
Can you add the "Starting offset" option?

chris_redinger · August 2

Really cool and I've used it before... but having a problem now.
I can't get it to extrude up to face or surface. It looks more like a linear pattern, all with the same end surface. Am I doing something wrong?
Notice that in the middle, it appears to be working ok

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/5n/856dh5itudv3.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/0e/70tcak3vntd8.png

chris_redinger · August 2

I can't get it to extrude up to surface/face. It looks like it works in the middle, but the outer grid areas appear to just be repeats of the inner parts!

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/wn/oxq97vd0k6d0.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022071/uploads/editor/7n/yc2b3lxw54yk.png

nick_sully · August 2

I am a bit of a novice - and I found this is very handy. I have ran into and issue and get a FeatureScript notice - "Cannot call a function that takes 0 arguments with 1".

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thank you.

EvanReese · August 2

Thanks for the feedback everyone. To be honest, there are still bugs I'd love to fix and improvements I'd love to make, but I can't make it a priority right now. This would be another of those situations where I'd be glad to push out some improvements that someone else helps code up though!

matt_venn · September 1

Hi Evan, and thanks for the great video and plugin! This is the first plugin I've used with onshape, and it's super cool!

I'm using it to texture 3d prints.

I have noticed a few things that might be broken or could be improved:

1/- the outline feature doesn't work for me

2/- if I try to use the plugin on multiple faces, it only usually works on the first one chosen

3/- if I try to use variable names, they don't 'take'. I would love this to work so after I add the 20 or so features to all the different faces, I can tweak them with variables.

Thanks again for the plugin!

Matt

EvanReese · September 3

Thanks! I'm no longer updating the feature, but I see a blue dot by yours, so you're not on the latest version. It might help with some of these things, but probably not all. The multiple faces thing won't be fixed, for example because it works just like the extrude feature.

matt_venn · September 10

thanks!

felix_fischer992 · December 20

Really cool feature, has served me very well on many occasions. I am currently trying to use it to add a pattern with relatively large hexagons to a fairly small surface.

The issue I'm running into here is that while trying to make the length of my model parametric, I found certain edge cases in which Grid extrude leaves tiny “holes” (see pictures). In the best case, this just looks bad, but since I want to fillet this, it completely breaks the feature for some lengths.

I know you aren't updating this any more, however I thought I'd just throw this out there, in case I am missing a really obvious solution here.

Document Link: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ac3bdac4d443b1d4aca05def/w/51b4d7859da0e1fe6c29492c/e/ecf3d234a94e3ce1d9e35123

Grid Extrude Custom Feature

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