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DXF importer, sketcher, text tool needs work
adam_bowers
Member Posts: 5 ✭
I've been hired to make a statue of some playing cards. Spoiler alert: Onshape just can't handle hearts, clubs or spades.
First thing that occurred to me was to find a DXF of the suit icons, import them as sketches and extrude them. Yeah, no. The DXFs come in as a series of separate lines which aren't connected and thus don't form an extrudable surface. No obvious way to connect all the line segments, even by hand. Highlighting the corners and clicking the coincident constraint button didn't constrain them.
The next thing that occurred to me was to use the text tool. The suit icons are characters in unicode, surely we can get this done. Nope! It won't parse those characters, you get a "character not found" square.
Then I tried drawing it by hand. This can probably be done, but carving the parts by hand would be less effort. You can't center one line over another one without a center point. Moving sketch objects around doesn't always work; I had a horizontal line with two arcs coincident to their ends. The line was not constrained in the horizontal sketch axis, but I couldn't get it to move left and right. It felt like the software was actively fighting me. That's a big problem I have with the sketch tool; it tells you when there is a degree of freedom, but offers absolutely no clue as to what it could be.
Needs a LOT of work.
First thing that occurred to me was to find a DXF of the suit icons, import them as sketches and extrude them. Yeah, no. The DXFs come in as a series of separate lines which aren't connected and thus don't form an extrudable surface. No obvious way to connect all the line segments, even by hand. Highlighting the corners and clicking the coincident constraint button didn't constrain them.
The next thing that occurred to me was to use the text tool. The suit icons are characters in unicode, surely we can get this done. Nope! It won't parse those characters, you get a "character not found" square.
Then I tried drawing it by hand. This can probably be done, but carving the parts by hand would be less effort. You can't center one line over another one without a center point. Moving sketch objects around doesn't always work; I had a horizontal line with two arcs coincident to their ends. The line was not constrained in the horizontal sketch axis, but I couldn't get it to move left and right. It felt like the software was actively fighting me. That's a big problem I have with the sketch tool; it tells you when there is a degree of freedom, but offers absolutely no clue as to what it could be.
Needs a LOT of work.
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https://cad.onshape.com/documents/55fd285628fd8f6d010fc4f6/w/cb47950a7095b4e6507ab3c5/e/393f881da5bd97d651a90aae