Hallo all
I am trying to make a cover for a lamp. Now what it basically is, is a net of “legs” going around the light. My problem are these “legs”.
I’ve made an example to explain my issue.
This is the cross section of the cover:
And extruded it looks like this:
I’ve drawn one “leg” that goes around the cover and my first idea was to simply extrude the area around the leg down through the object. The legs cross section are 10x3mm. That look like this:
At first glance okay, but because the extrusion works perpendicular to the surface it makes small notches where the leg bend.
Second idea was to use the sweep function. So I made a 10x3mm square at the bottom of the leg and selected the lines around the object. But as sweep dosen’t support double guided lines the result ended looking like this:
All twisted.
Now my third idea was to guide the profile of the leg all around the object using Loft. I created planes after all the direction changes:
Added the cross section of the leg at each new plane where it intersected with the guide lines and used Loft:
Okay that’s a no brainer. So I tried to select the guidlines but got this message:
So what if I find the plane that cuts the direction change in half and put in a cross section of the leg there? So I extrude both cross section into each other and use “intersect”. The remaining piece I use to find the angle bisector and with that I can create a new plane on which I can draw a new cross section of the leg. After that all I need to do is use loft again and choose this extra cross section!:
Aaand it is all bendy. Now this was my last idea.
This is just an example. I need to do this with a lot of “legs” some of which intersect. But even the most tedious idea, which would take ages, dosen’t work for me.
How would you solve this. Need new ideas and inspiration.
Thank you.
Kind regards
Jonas
