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Why can't OnShape generate "oversize" chamfers? (Question/Feature Request)
aidan_fraser
Member Posts: 6 ✭
Hi all, sorry if this is a repost/resurrection of an old topic but I couldn't find much discussion about this.
Often I find myself wanting to use a sweep shape or chamfer distance that onshape doesn't accept. It's "too big", it has self-intersections around tight radii and I get an error message about self-intersection.
Another post by an onshape employee on another thread suggested this was to avoid generating bad geometry. I understand that we want to avoid bad geometry, but this isn't a satisfying explanation for me.
I'm trying to understand the rationale for the restriction. There are reasonable cases when a sweep or chamfer intersects itself. Often, increasing the sweep radius, or reducing the size of the sweeping shape can be a good workaround, but often it's an unacceptable compromise.
One common case I find quite a bit is trying to model a routed cut along a curved edge that has some radii/details that are smaller than the routed shape. I think it's a reasonable thing to want to do, because it's easy to imagine and describe the part. And manufacturing it can be really simple with a standard router.
I accept I may being totally naive here, but it feels like OnShape could accept "oversize" chamfers, at least in some simple cases (e.g. circular radii), since manually modelling these cases usually doesn't require a lot of thought, just lots of clicks and extra planes and sketches.
Thoughts?
Often I find myself wanting to use a sweep shape or chamfer distance that onshape doesn't accept. It's "too big", it has self-intersections around tight radii and I get an error message about self-intersection.
Another post by an onshape employee on another thread suggested this was to avoid generating bad geometry. I understand that we want to avoid bad geometry, but this isn't a satisfying explanation for me.
I'm trying to understand the rationale for the restriction. There are reasonable cases when a sweep or chamfer intersects itself. Often, increasing the sweep radius, or reducing the size of the sweeping shape can be a good workaround, but often it's an unacceptable compromise.
One common case I find quite a bit is trying to model a routed cut along a curved edge that has some radii/details that are smaller than the routed shape. I think it's a reasonable thing to want to do, because it's easy to imagine and describe the part. And manufacturing it can be really simple with a standard router.
I accept I may being totally naive here, but it feels like OnShape could accept "oversize" chamfers, at least in some simple cases (e.g. circular radii), since manually modelling these cases usually doesn't require a lot of thought, just lots of clicks and extra planes and sketches.
Thoughts?
0
Comments
Website: ovyl.io
Hopefully this explains what I mean. (Check out the source doc if you like)
This "over-sized chamfer" feature would make OS more expressive, and parameterized models would be more robust (bigger parameter space). Maybe I'm a weirdo? Wouldn't be the first time! But it's hard to imagine this not helping a lot of OS users.
I am pretty naive to the way OS is implemented, but I imagine it's possible to detect intersections in the swept chamfer and internally split the chamfer into two separate chamfer operations.
Maybe I should try to make a prototype FS feature?