Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Options
Creating a Composite Surface from an Imported Mesh.
malcolm_smith_1
Member Posts: 27 ✭✭
I'm currently investigating Onshape for our company, to replace Autodesk Inventor. Referring to a discussion here https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/5248/recognize-stl-as-a-solid-for-use-of-full-suite-of-part-studio-tools#latest I have a need to be able to convert an imported mesh into a composite surface, mainly so that I can use the Intersection tool in a sketch to derive section curves from the surface. The only way I have found to do this so far is to use the three vertices from one element of the mesh to define a plane, do a sketch on the plane of a triangle defined by the three vertices and use that to create a small surface. You would need to do that for every element on the surface to convert the whole mesh. Is this something that could be done using FeatureScript? Maybe the script could have an option to select an area of the mesh, rather than the whole mesh, to reduce computation time?
1
Comments
Joe
- Start the Faceted Surface FS
- Select 3 or more points from a mesh body in a "daisy chain", each successive point connected to the last via a line segment.
- A plane is generated using the first 3 points
- A triangle is sketched on that plane using the same 3 points
- That triangular sketch region is offset/copied to create a surface
- Each additional point generates a new triangular surface when matched with the preceding 2 points
If FS has access to the STL/mesh data, then the whole process could be automated by selecting the mesh body, since I believe STL files group vertices in such a way that facet surface location/orientation can be inferred. But I don't know enough about the inner workings of FS and/or the OS API to say whether that's doable or not.