I an trying to recreate some of my old designs that were done on a different cad software to see what the limits I would encounter with going to Shapr3D for all my more detailed designs. what i am trying to accomplish is to create a variable fillet starting with a 2" tapering to a 1 3/4" to a 1/2" to a 3/8" fillet. I have tried to create a loft with not much luck because when looking in the front view it follows a certain contour and it also follows a different contour when looking from the top view, any help would be apricated. Also I do know that the Shapr3D does plan to add a variable fillet function in the future. here are some pictures of the fillet and contour.
That’s not a problem I knew that S3D is looking to do something with it in the future I was just hoping that someone might be able to come up with a good idea of a work around for it now, maybe a loft as a body then subtract it from the main body. I can see that Shapr3D is getting better and better in every update keep up the great work.
Here’s a workaround that comes close to what you want to do. I made a compound edge and did a variable fillet from one end to the other. It does not have those checkpoint radii per your initial image however it does make a continuous smooth fillet. I used Sweep and Scale. Note the anomaly at the end of the sweep where I had to make a slight rotation adjustment.
Hope this helps.
Note: this isn’t as clean as I’d like. It does leave a bit of a step on the upper and side surface. It may be remedied with some additional tweaks.
TigerMike I knew if I put the request out there you would come thru for me. Either one of them are great ideas I tried to create it using a loft command but I think the sweep command works better because when I tried to use the loft command I could not get the guide lines in there correctly to get the smooth variable fillet. You reassured be that Shapr3D can compete against the big Cad software out there to create difficult models.
Mike I tried you solution and I think it would work great for what I need but just wondering how did you got you sweep trajectory line to pick as one entity because mine seems to only be able to pick segments of the trajectory, is it because I added fillets to the bottom of the part after extruding the part. So after my sweep is done and when I scale the opposite end per you video it will only scale the last segment because of the trajectory line being picked in segments not one entity. Let me know what you think I can do to fix it to be more like your suggestion.
Great workaround! I’m coming from Solidworks where all that stuff exists and I don’t think you could do this method in Solidworks. It actually looks clean on the second try. Now if I could only dimension to splines for overall dimension or add construction Iines to drawings to dimension to. _0_/ ugh!
Dan, I understand your dilemma. The edge in my model is one continuous edge. I believe you are connecting multiple splines(?). I Tried spitting my body in 3 parts and commenced with the sweep making one solid body. I too have the issue where only the 3rd segment I was able to scale it down. Not sure if this is a Sweep issue or not. Also, I tried to do the sweep in 3 stages. After the first stage I could not scale the end face however when I created the 2nd sweep I was able to scale down the 2nd face. And, it only scaled down at the 2nd segment I hope you get my meaning here. Not sure how else to proceed.
I totally understand Mike and I really apricate you input. I may try a few more different techniques or I may just have to make it a single fillet for now then redo it later when the variable fillet option comes out for Shapr3D.
Mike I just wanted to let you know that I was finally able to get the variable fillet into my design but it did take a little bit of thinking on how to do it. What i did was create the variable fillet in a different Cad software and just keep the variable fillet and a little more material on the bottom and outside then save it out as a step file then import that step file into the S3D design then align it in place and do a subtract of the step file part from the S3D design and the fillet came in good. My hope is that in the near future Shapr3D will add Variable fillet options to their fillet command to be able to do this a lot easier.
I agree there has to be more options added to creating fillets in Shapr3d otherwise it will not be able to compete with the other Cad software out there.
We have already added many new options to the FIllet command in the parametric beta, and there is more to come, including chord length fillets and variable radius fillets.
Great to hear Istvan I new that you guys were on top of the fillet options, I really cannot wait to see Variable radius fillets that will be a game changer for me. Just as a suggestion when editing a fillet to add more edges it would be nice to see a preview of the outcome before you finish the command to see if it fails or to see if that outcome is what was expected.
A few weeks ago, the latest version of Parasolid added support for chordal fillets, but only works in more simple cases. We’ll expose this functionality in the coming months.
