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:
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!:
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.
That is a good idea and really easy to replicate through the design. However the issue with this method is that the more the legs gets rotated the wider they get. I want the legs to be the same width.
Thank you so much for your suggestions. I can’t get my head around the twist part, but I get the “cut the excessiv materiale” idea. And can’t argue with the end result - looks a lot like what im thinking of.
I tried to use the extrude funktion again but from the inside out - creating the legs instead of removing the surroundings. This leaves a gap between the parts that can be filled using the loft function. This is still not perfekt as there are still some noncontinuity through the path of the leg.
I really didn’t think that this would be such a hard nut to crack. But I am all out of ideas on how to bend this little 3x10mm profile around a random object.
Mighty task. I’ll give it some more think later. Maybe someone else will come along and help. Would you mind if I made myself a sconce with the work I showed you? I have a couple ugly ones I want to"fix".
Since I’ll be printing it, I have to give it some thought about how light plays through 3D printed materials. I’m kinda already on that quest with another project I am working on.
Thanks for the reply. I also tried the sweep funktion (see my second try in the original post.). My problem is that as it goes around it twist the profile so the leg doesn’t aligne with the base when it’s on the other side. It’s hard to see in your video if ‘your legs’ does the same. Besides that i think your video looks cool!
If you managed to sweep the legs around without them twisting. How did you do so?
Yeah it looks like your methode also twist the legs. It is easier to see in my design because the legs profile is a rectangle.
I don’t know what you mean by splay, but if it is how you manage to arrange the legs as you have I would love to know how you done that. If I should do it, it would be a lot of manual work and the spacing between the legs looks really nice.
Hi @JPressN so I tried this , the plane of the shape is true so it doesn’t twist but there it a lot to do as each segment is slightly longer than the other as It radiates through a straight structure but have a look and see if I’m getting closer I didn’t do them all but did 4/5 i think I need to redo no 4 as it’s not quite right , took me a while to get the method but as I said each one has to be done individually ad they are all slightly different
