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NEW Custom Feature: Drape Surface
Drape Surface essentially takes an input surface, and sticks it to another body like a sticker, which is useful for approximating meshes, and for creating a single surface that approximates a bunch of surface patches. Here's a link to the feature, and here's a video explanation of the feature. If your company needs something custom get in touch with me at theonsherpa.com. Enjoy!
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This is magic.
So it doesn't even use the mesh points, it just raycasts? Briliant!
Will probably use this for all my future mesh workflows.
Heads up, the video image doesn't open the link for me. Had to click the video link.
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What you said was mesh workflows, what I heard was there's a topological sledgehammer that could be applied to my surface tweening experiments.
Yep, and there's no need to reapproximate the curves like with opDropcurve()
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD I'm intrigued. I've thought about doing tween surfaces (and curves) but haven't actually run into many use-cases so it keeps getting bumped. I was imagining getting the b-spline surface points for two surfaces and just regenerating new point grids between the two. As long as the inputs are similar it should be straightforward and most of the code of a great feature would be in reapproximating things and making them line up in smart ways. What use-casea are you picturing?
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
@EvanReese The practical use cases for each aren't exactly the most apparent thing for tween surfaces or tween curves until you're working with outside design firms that are run by Rhino jockeys or Adobe users with those functions built into their tool wondering why you find it so hard to find the geometric median of their spliney linework and models. This may be an industry dependent problem.
At the most basic level (and the reason I'm working on tween curve right now) is finding the precise centerline of wavy geometry that needs to have regularly spaced features in the dead center of the parts. Offsetting lines on either side doesn't work because the width is constantly varying across the profile of the part, and this designer is extremely picky and is willing to pay enough for the details to be perfect so one workflow we've used is doing a draft extrude on the face to brute force a median line and project it back to the original surface. We've also done a face sculpt to trick the face to be a spline so UV curves will populate but truly the best method is the one you describe which is to grab the spline definitions of the edges, approximate and/or elevate to match them and build the curve in the middle.
At the further end of the scale are things like the custom flex featurescript floating around that does things piecewise and isn't as clean as other CAD flex features. Theoretically if you were working with a mid-surface you could store the vectors towards the control points for each surface that was used as an input (mapped in UV context), do your twisting and deformation to the median, and then reconstruct the input surfaces at the end and get a more robust flex feature with continuous surfaces. And with it being a tween function you can parameterize for arbitrary k factors as well. Think meta-materials or kerf bending plywood sheets with CNC grooves.
There are more reverse engineering applications as well that I've run into, but the main two are dealing with import geometry from non-parametric software and wanting to bend and unbend non-sheet metal things.
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD I'd love to get a whole suite of native tools for deformation similar to what I'd use in Rhino (twist, taper, bend, cage edit, flow along surface). I think that trying to do that with FS right now is just not practical, but I think Parasolid is up to the task.
I'd love having a tween curve and tween surface feature so hopefully borrowing some of my code will help!
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com