Continuing on my quest for a PolyShape, I have been able to create the ‘shape’ as a set of 5 adjacent sketches each of which form an adjacent face. The trick to do this is to redraw/overdraw what seem to be common lines.
If I could turn this into a true shape, I would then Shell it out with hollow base and thickness of 0.187 in. And then go on to eliminate the centers of the triangular faces via Inset with the Offset tool. Something like this…
The question is how to make a shape of this?
If I can’t find a solution, I will have to extrude the faces to simulate the shell tool and be able to do a Union of my 5 shapes. I don’t want to do this because the faces are at angles and I am not sure how much cleanup there will be. For example, on the base, I would expect a triangular ridge just interior to the periphery. On the elevated sides, it might work? In experimental territory, who knows?
deets suggested approach of working from a rectangular 3D shape and pushing away the unwanted triangular elements worked. Curiously pushing the last element to be eliminated would always result in a Fail with error message. So I Translated the shape with Copy and it worked on the Copy.
In retrospect I was thinking a bit 2D when I should have considered this simple 3D approach. However I suspect if the base polygon has many sides that this could get a bit messy.
Unfortunately this technique (intersecting Toblerone cross section shapes) will only work with a base quadrilateral with opposite sides of equal length.
So I am back to my original space frame approach. This should work with any base that is a polygon that is lofted to a point.
For anyone interested, I tried an approach rotating extruded thin wall rectangles that matched the periphery inward, calculated using trig, such that their outer walls would intersect at a point, the apex. Learned a lot and got better at it. Got my apex. Unfortunately there were a lot of overprojections and I managed to mangle the model getting rid of these. Got strange projections at top so I just subtracted it off. Other three large faces will not accept an Inset.
Something went a bit crazy when I used the offset tool to set a base to Extrude a section to subtract from unwanted projection. I only used Offset once per face but lots more happened.
My next approach will be rotating extruded thin wall triangular elements. Have already done most of the math. Will advise… Always looking for an easier way — essentially lofting a polygon to a point with resultant planar faces.
This is just a learning exercise so I will restart from scratch…
I have a method to create this type of model which I explained in other posts about Construction Geometry and Plane Between 3 Points.
It is tedious to get the faces well aligned as the vertices are really not the same point in space. There may always be small gaps if you zoom to a bigger magnification. I plan to handle this when I Extrude each element into a thin walled solid, say 0.20 in. The model is roughly 4 x 5 x 6. I have done some tests on cleanup and fillin for the extrusions. Tedious but doable. Will advise.
