Introducing Enanced Planes: Make tangent planes much easier!

dave_cowden

Have you ever wished it was easier to create planes, especially tangent planes?  We're pleased to announce a free public Beta of our Enhanced Planes Featurescript plugin.

With Enhanced Planes, you can create a planes:

• Normal to edges
• Tangent to surfaces at a point
• Tangent to surfaces and aligned with another plane or direction 
• Arrays of midplanes, both parallel and rotated
• Arrays of offset planes
• Plane defined by 1 edge that can define a plane

Read more about it here, or get started right away:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/0de04acb5bac92ca16796edf/w/cdd1d1882311084fe54bff24/e/a5d41dfaf231356100c09b1a

We have several other cool addins in our store, including a tool to create 3D points from text, a socket screw creator, and an ansi washer creator. 

http://store.parametricparts.com/products.html


Is there another type of plane you wish was fewer steps to create? Let us know!

henry_feldman

dave_cowden said:

Is there another type of plane you wish was fewer steps to create? Let us know!

This feature worked great, and in answer to the above question, sort of. Here is what I would like as an addition (I know, sort of getting into the OpenSCAD area). I would like a linear/circular pattern combined with tangent planes. In other words, I want to take a surface, give it a starting point, spacing normalized to the surface in 2 dimensions, and have it follow the surface to produce regularly spaces planes. If you see the example below, I used a linear pattern of points on a plane across the spline, and of course it produces a non-regular spacing. But at least the holes are normal to the surface! (without that they won't 3D print correctly)

dave_cowden

Oh that's a very interesting idea. Ok, so let make sure I understand:

Inputs:  Surface
             Point on the surface
             Linear/circular
             reference direction line 
             if circular: 
                  angle from direction [default 360 ]
                  spacing (angular units)
                  count
             if linear:
                  spacing (length units)
                  # in x
                  # in y

Output:  Tangent planes on surface at each point

Is that about right?
                  

henry_feldman

dave_cowden said:

Oh that's a very interesting idea. Ok, so let make sure I understand:

Inputs:  Surface
             Point on the surface
             Linear/circular
             reference direction line 
             if circular: 
                  angle from direction [default 360 ]
                  spacing (angular units)
                  count
             if linear:
                  spacing (length units)
                  # in x
                  # in y

Output:  Tangent planes on surface at each point

Is that about right?
                  

Yep. That is perfect. This essentially is the poor man's version of 3D linear pattern since I can then (or haha my interns) copy/past sketches onto each plane to make a normalized set of holes or whatever

dave_cowden

would it be better if I just implemented 3d surface pattern isntead? it seems like a shame to do lots of fancy stuff to create a bunch of planes, which then just results in manual work on each of them....

what if I added an entity selection to the above, and then patterned it onto the planes for you?

henry_feldman

dave_cowden said:

would it be better if I just implemented 3d surface pattern isntead? it seems like a shame to do lots of fancy stuff to create a bunch of planes, which then just results in manual work on each of them....

what if I added an entity selection to the above, and then patterned it onto the planes for you?

Well yes, that would be even more awesome...

dave_cowden

ok. i'll add that my list.  I have a couple of other features in development. I think a parametric surface pattern shouldnt be too difficult. I can't promise anything time-wise, right now i'm working on a text feature for doing text on surfaces, and I'd like to finish that first

henry_feldman

dave_cowden said:

ok. i'll add that my list.  I have a couple of other features in development. I think a parametric surface pattern shouldnt be too difficult. I can't promise anything time-wise, right now i'm working on a text feature for doing text on surfaces, and I'd like to finish that first

That would have been super helpful for this project

dave_cowden

that's good to know. I've done text before and it is a pain. it is turning out to be pretty non-trivial to do a good job of surface text, but i'm almost there, stay tuned.