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Help! I cant seem to find out how to modify an ellipse how I want

allen_eureallen_eure Member Posts: 4

I found a design on here and wanted to modify it but started from scratch and I dont understand what the original creator was doing. I want to have an ellipse but "square" if off so the corners puff out a little more.

In the below picture is the thing I am trying to copy but dont understand how its working. The ellipse line will adjust bast off the straight line values. I see that there is a construction ellipse used but dont understand how it plays in. Any help replicating this would be grealy appreciated.

Comments

  • GregBrownGregBrown Member, Onshape Employees, csevp Posts: 219

    At a wild guess there is only one ellipse here, and it is the construction geom. It is being used to place the ends of a spline, whose handles are dimensioned and also constrained to be vertical or horizonal, respectively. There is initially only one spline but it is then mirrored to create the four… These four splines were then offset by 10mm.

    e.g. https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f3f33634e6d3c57dd82d2c4d/w/8f5623d884035f2d1a271b7d/e/ad9d882edcc30acb00f6b312

    There are a million other possibilities, this is one. For instance, the ellipse is only being used to define the major/minor axes dimensions - you could do it by directly dimensioing the spline endpoints. But perhaps the original user was referencing an already existing ellipse.

  • mahirmahir Member, Developers Posts: 1,309 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Also, generally speaking, an ellipse will always be kind of egg shaped. A single ellipse can't be massaged to give it a more square shape unless you construct it using multiple sections. Maybe you'd be better off actually starting with a rectangle and adding conic fillets.

  • allen_eureallen_eure Member Posts: 4

    Thanks for the help with this! After I posted this about 20 minutes more of playing I found the spline which was exactly what was going on. I should have recognized the mirror sooner as the other lines didn't have dimensions.

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