3D modeling FreeCAD 0.19 tutorial - Thickness modifiers

hello and welcome to another video tutorial with me andrew today i'm going to be showing you how to use the thickness modifier within the parts and part design workbenches without further ado let's get into it now i will warn you from the get-go that the thickness modifier the thickness tool doesn't really have much to it different modes and different modifiers that don't actually work so i'll point them out as we go along so to start things off i'm going to go into the part workbench and i'm going to create myself a solid cube like so in 0.19 the icon has changed within the part workbench i'm guessing to create consistency with part design the icon used to look like this and was named utility to apply a thickness the thickness tool can be found up here on our tool ribbon and as you can see it's currently grayed out if i click on one of the faces of our cube you'll see that it now becomes active if i click that it then shells our cube with a one millimeter thickness around all the other faces that we didn't select as an example if i cancel this click on these three faces by holding ctrl and then click onto the thickness modifier you'll see that it creates a thickness on the other three faces as another example if i cancel that the maximum amount of faces that we can actually select before it doesn't work is four so as you can see it works here we've got two faces that have now got thickness to them if i then go and add even more faces just so that we've got one face left and i click on the modifier it doesn't work now obviously if you want to do that anyway if you want to add a thickness to just one face you'd probably alter the cube itself or just create yourself a pad in the part design workbench now back to the original design where we've added a thickness or created a shell around our original cube as you can see we now have a control panel on the left hand side with a couple of parameters that can be changed so currently our thickness is set to one and if i set that to minus 1 the thickness is faced inwards so for the purposes of the next bit i'm going to set that back to a positive and i might set that to a 1.5 wall thickness now for the modes the only one that seems to work is actually skin now pipe doesn't seem to work and i'm assuming that it would create some sort of box section which would create a hole through the center in this case square and again i'm not entirely sure what recto verso does i've looked for all the documentation i've looked onto the forums and different videos i've even watched tutorials myself and i'm not entirely sure what this actually does and i don't think anyone else is so if you do know what this does please let me know in the comments down below and how i and other viewers may be able to recreate that so for us to actually create a pipe instead of using the mode we can actually just select faces that are opposite each other so i click on the faces icon which is down here click on our top face hold ctrl and click on our bottom face and then click done you'll see that it's now created a shell or some sort of box section even if i set out to pipe it still doesn't actually change anything so i'm going to set that back to skin and now we'll move on to the join type as you can see is set to arc which is the default setting and we've got our arcs around the outside now even if i set that to a minus so the thickness is inverted the arcs don't actually move onto the inside of our shape i'll reset that back to a positive and click on our join type drop down you'll see that we've got three options arc which i've already explained tangent which i'm not entirely sure again what that actually does i don't know whether i haven't got the correct setup again i've looked at different videos and documentations and i can't actually see any way of recreating that and then you've got intersection which will basically sharpen our corners and remove the arc coming to intersection and self-intersection i'm going to start sounding like a stuck record as i also don't know what these do and how they work i've tried multiple parts and using these don't seem to change the geometry on the freecad wiki the self-intersection is described as a self-intersection so again if you know what they do and how they work let us know in the comments down below moving on to the part design workbench the fitness tool is relatively similar to that of the part tool the only difference being the red color added to the icon so if i create myself a simple additive cone and say okay to that you'll find that the thickness tool is up here as you can see this one is always active and even if we click on it it will ask us to select an edge or a face or body so if i select the top of our cone click on the thickness tool and you'll see that we have now created a thickness around the outside as you can see we have a parameters panel to the left which is similar to the one in the part workbench however this one allows us to add and remove faces with relative ease so if i now remove that face you'll now see that we have a radius on the top of our cone and if i change the join type to intersection you'll see that it now becomes sharp to invert the thickness we don't have to put a minus in this box as it won't allow us to all we have to do is click on the tick box down here which is make thickness inwards and as you can see it changes like so moving to this example of an x-joint this reminds me of some sort of exhaust section so what i've got here is i've got a simple additive pipe which flows along a path which is in the x and y and just a simple circle i've then cloned that into another body like so i've then fused them together within the part workbench using the boolean modifiers so if i just hide these other two bodies and we'll use the thickness on our fusion so if i just selected one face and clicked on the thickness it would create something like this so we'd have a hole going through this side and it would flow the whole way around our shape it would just create a flat on the outlets of our pipe if i click on faces and i click on all four faces of our x-pipe and click on done you'll see that it now creates a pipe that flows through nicely you'll notice as well there's no radiuses on our part if i change our thickness to a minus so that it's going inwards you'll see that a radius is created on the inside now i'm not entirely sure why it does it for this but it doesn't do it for say the cube but i don't think it's actually a massive deal i think if we were to go into the part design workbench and turn this into a body we could then use the philip tool quite easily and create radiuses around our parts as and if we wanted to so i just thought i'd show you that because that's a design that actually worked moving on to the next design though this is something that didn't work at all so this is something i was trying to create where it had one inlet and two outlets if i select our three faces and click on the thickness modifier you'll see that we get some sort of buggy geometry i think it goes to show that the more complex that we create our geometry the more likely it is to fail especially with different modifiers moving over to this particular design it was created within the part workbench and all it is is three different cylinders and they're positioned similarly to the last error that we had in this one though if i click on all three faces and click on the thickness modifier you'll see that it works absolutely perfectly it doesn't throw up a single error and it's basically the same complexity the difference between these two projects is that this is using solid cylinders whereas the other one in the part design workbench is using additive pipe now this may work in a positive but if we set this to a minus it doesn't actually change so i'm assuming that this is good enough for a positive thickness when it comes to a negative thickness it could potentially fail so if i say okay to that you'll see that it froze up an error for another error here i have two cylinders in a fusion i'm in the part workbench i'm going to select the three faces and for this i want to create a pipe so i'm going to click on the thickness modifier and as you can see it's done just that and it works really well if i then crank this up the thickness to save 10 you'll see that we get a major failure and the reason for that is because as this thickness here intersects with the edge of our pot it froze a bit of a wobbly so you'll see here i've brought it down to 3.2 mil and as i start to bring it down you'll see that about three mil it fails so again just go careful with the geometry you've got and actually the thickness that you're trying to make that geometry another thing is the shapes you're trying to create a shell of must be part of the same geometry so as you'll see here i have a fusion connecting these two cylinders so if i remove that and try to use the thickness on this cylinder here and then select faces you'll see that i won't be able to select the second shape it just won't allow me so just another thing that i found that was slightly confusing so here i've got myself a cube and a cylinder now as you'll see the seam of the cylinder is currently in the actual cube itself so if i create a cut using the booleans up here you'll see that the seam is transferred to the cube if i select these faces and try to shell it it doesn't work so if i cancel that under our cut and i transform our cylinder so that we rotate the seam out of the actual material itself so a little bit more there and say okay to that if i then create a cut like so you'll see that the seam isn't transferred onto the cube if i now use the shell tool you'll see that it works absolutely fine so for the final example you'll see here i've got two different size cylinders one of them is at a slight angle and this is in the part workbench i've created a fusion like so by using the boolean modifiers and i'm just going to create myself a simple thickness as you can see this piece of geometry works absolutely fine there's no major collisions and the parts seem to fit together nicely throwing up no errors if i change our thickness to a minus see that radius on the inside a little bit better and how these two pipes blend together seamlessly if i say okay to that and move over into the part design workbench selecting our thickness and i create a body i can then modify and create a fillet around the outside like so now this doesn't have to be done but it can add a little bit more detail to our part alternatively you can also add one to the bottom and say okay and that's all for today's video hopefully i've shown you something new that you can utilize within freecad as a whole i really like this tool in some cases it makes the process quicker especially when creating parts that flow like the x-joint obviously the modes and joints that don't seem to work are a little annoying and i'm sorry i can't expand on those anymore hopefully a future update can solve these issues making the fitness tool less confusing over the christmas period i've taken some of your ideas on board such as showing the robot workbench and full fax's module i'd like to show these alongside projects within the workshop as i'd really like to take my videos to a more creative level such as projects that involve physically creating items we've made within freecad let me know what you think in the comments down below i also have a contact email on my about page so feel free to reach out to me with some of your video ideas that you think the community might benefit from thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it if you liked the video give it a thumbs up and if you dislike the video give it a thumbs down and as always have an absolutely epic weekend and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Andrew CAD

Views: 8,929

Keywords: fusion 360 alternative, FreeCAD, Tutorial, Learning, design, 3D, engineer, CAD, Quality, how to guide, create, datum, detailed, version, 0.18, learn, explained, sketch, workbench, part design, module, tool, freecad, cad, modifier, educational, descriptive, creating, part, how to use, Freecad drawing, plan, geometry, plane, examples, how, to, 0.19, 3D model, 3D builder, boolean, cut, fusion, union, thickness, utility to a thickness, 2021, arc, self intersect, intersect, tangent

Id: fonfqS4s7dE

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021