3D2A CAD Design with Chairmanwon

welcome back to Hoffman tactical in today's video and before we get started let me turn off this creepy music and then we will continue with our intro um the music is creepy I will say um okay so continuing with this video uh welcome back to Hoffman tactical in today's video uh we are going to be doing another live stream we're going to be discussing CAD design and some of the different techniques we use to design uh frames and receivers and I have on a very special guest uh today and that is uh chairman Juan and he is known for his uh Glock frames which are uh have a heavy focus on ergonomics so he's done a lot of CAD modeling I think uh by the name chairman Juan you can also guess that he's also designed some uh Furniture so that's kind of his background so he's done a lot of CAD modeling and obviously I do a lot of cab modeling so we should have a really interesting stream the goal of today's stream is going to be discussing surfacing and doing more complex curved surfaces and why we do that and kind of trying to demystify surfacing a little bit and talking about some of the different techniques uh to maybe help you guys step away from some of the more basic Extrusion solid modeling techniques and get into a bit more complex surfacing and doing uh more organic curves and such on your parts so with that said um I think I'll bring chairman on and uh I think actually he's not quite here yet but he will be soon um but see that's all right just a second there and oh whoa hey sorry it was uh it was just a chair there you know yeah I was so inspired by that uh Herman Miller CEO ladies little uh speech about you know people working harder and uh not working for money that you know I decided to buy one myself don't worry about it you don't get the reference but I don't know if my viewers do either oh it was it was big on the internet this week but hey how's it going man it's been a while yeah it's been a while I'm super glad to have you on again this should be a really interesting stream back to more uh probably very dry for most people but uh back to more uh CAD design discussions so uh that's what we're gonna be talking about today and uh I hope you're ready topic today is surfacing which is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit people talk about surfacing you know they say oh this is uh this is a surfaced model it's kind of like a uh it's kind of like a magic term to inject quality and uh how people talk about their CAD models but uh yeah yeah I feel like not too many people really uh kind of understand what we're talking about there and uh why it makes such a big difference from kind of the type of CAD that most people are used to oh yeah those are those are those are some surfaces lots of this is lots of services actually 100 I'm doing this guy here is actually 100 surface so not not a single solid body in it uh until of course we complete it but wait that's crazy that that program is called SolidWorks how are you how are you working without solids that doesn't make any sense I'm super confused it's very disingenuous and uh I actually haven't really thought about that too much until you mentioned it but yeah SolidWorks was a really bad name uh since we actually are not working with any solids at this point I guess solid is an option and the end result will be a solid but as of now it's strictly surfaces so there's no actual solid here it's uh just one it's just uh three-dimensional surfaces but they have no thickness so there's no actual body here so I guess we should start with what is a surface so a surface in in CAD is an object without any thickness so a surface is made by three or more edges that are bounded in such a way and that bounding box that two-dimensional plane that is the center of that polygon is what we refer to as a surface now it's not just something where you draw a square or Draw you know two curves and connect them and that's all you can do in surfacing you can do a lot of stuff by controlling exactly how that surface progresses through that you know shape so you can see you know what Hoffman has here with the grip that's not just a straight connection between so hold on one of those surfaces so people can see the uh the bounding yeah let me um yeah there you go if you just Mouse over it people can see it so you can see how there's connections the edges but the surface is a lot more than just connecting all those edges exactly so so basically what it does is it allows us it um it allows us to do a lot more complex geometry without all of the headaches and problems you get trying to do it with more traditional solid modeling techniques so uh so what what Tim is saying here is that in solid modeling you have to have a valid solid so it's in the name SolidWorks my program solid Edge the only type of geometry that these programs recognize is valid is a solid model so in Old School kind of like CAD if you're a rhino person you might recognize the term water tight so a watertight Model A solid model that's the only type of pro you know stuff that these programs recognize surfacing lets us break out of just working in the constraints of hey what's a valid solid and then we can apply what we get out of surfacing back onto those solids and so often I think you and I are probably work in very different ways so it looks like you're basically building something out of surfaces and then basically thickening it well so I'm not thickening actually what I what I'm going to do here is I build the entire part and then I simply Stitch it together you Stitch the surfaces together I build the watertight model completely so right now it's obviously not tight at all that's a that's a very Rhino like kind of way to go about it this is not how I have usually done things this particular model is the first one I've done this just because it's um it's making it easier and that makes sense so my my the general way I go about it actually is I start with Primitives and then use surfaces to basically modify off those and you know that might be a face replace that might be a Boolean operation you know thickening a surface and then using a Boolean um so this is so that that is very so I do not use Boolean operations at all actually oh they're they're very good they're very they can be very they can be very powerful if you use them correctly okay yeah I definitely need to lean into that some and for whatever reason SolidWorks just um froze up on me for no reason but are you still there yeah that's weird for absolutely no reason I didn't even click on anything I don't know if anyone can see it on the uh no it's it's it's your your model is still on the screen it's just uh it's just it's just not moving or anything yeah it's it's frozen up for for whatever strange reason I'm not sure why I think I just uh now we're back yeah that was kind of weird yeah welcome to SolidWorks everyone um yeah so in this particular case I could bring up some previous examples of what I've done uh but in this particular case because I'm I'm the problem with using solid but I had was using solid bodies and mixing surfacing and solid bodies was I ended up cutting the solid apart into surfaces anyway and then I would re-stitch it back together and if I went back and wanted to change something I could run into uh reference problems so I would go change the the solid and then when I re-stitched it I would run into reference problems later on ah so that's that's where Boolean operations become really powerful so you don't have to worry about about them being uh directly linked to the other geometry exactly so a Boolean like so basically let's say you um here uh switch so give give uh bring me give me Priority on the uh like make me the the big the big box let me go I think I can go let's see let's see how do I which button do I hit here uh there should be a way there should be a way to like full screen me ah yeah there is there is I don't know why it's not um let's go there we go there we go alrighty so you can see here this is one I kind of like my V3 models and if I show all of my surfaces you can see a lot of these are what we traditionally recognize as surfaces so are those surfaces are those planes oh surf uh uh a plane can be a surface true yes but I mean so in SolidWorks there's there are reference planes which which are which are treated by their program like a surface except they're not actually valid geometry yeah well so SolidWorks in solid Edge treat things exactly the same way because they're both based on the parasolid modeling system yeah uh sometimes I'll use surfaces like planes just so I can control them from sketches in a more like easy parametric way I now do the same thing I I yeah exactly yeah so so sometimes if I want a reference plane I'll make a surface just because that surface can be defined just as like un extruded plane uh so you know it it just sometimes makes my uh my parametrics a little bit easier but you can see here I have quite a few surfaces and solid Edge calls these construction bodies but I have a few I have quite a few surfaces that have some uh some thickness to them and those are basically self-contained solid bodies that are defined by surfaces so like this thumb Groove and I use I use a lot of these this is this is interesting I haven't seen this before uh so you're using these to kind of cut away at the main part uh yeah hold on one sec it's it's we're having classic classic CAD problems here yeah you know it it it it it works fine on uh on on uh and so I'm just I'm just I'm just hiding my uh my screen while I pull this back up so I don't know dox myself with some uh directory name or something sorry I'm I'm just gonna open this not in the context of an assembly um and there we go all right and we're back all right there we go and I'll make you big there we go alrighty so I'm gonna show all of my surfaces and that obviously takes a second because I use quite a few of them and so yeah each one of these surfaces is actually a um so yeah here's one here's a good one so this is this is what's creating the front strap and it's not like connected to the rest of the model in any way so it's a surface controlled by sketches that's then extruded out into its own unique design body is that a thickened surface yeah it's a thickened surface and then that basically becomes its own watertight model that's separate from the main design body so and then are you using that to cut away from the main body exactly but the really nice part about doing it this way is so this becomes a construction body so anything that's a surface or a you know actual solid you can say hey this isn't part of my design I'm just using this for uh constructing the actual designs so it doesn't actually like even though geometrically it's just as much a valid solid as any other part of your model or any other real model any other real solid body uh it just basically gets ignored when it comes to you know determining what's a solid or not or so what's a solid or not so this is a thickened surface that's controlled by you know maybe four sketches but if I want to change that front strap it's not all of those sketches and those surfaces aren't directly tied to the rest of the model they're just tied to this one design body that's only interacting with the rest of the model through you know a Boolean subtract operation wouldn't that cause integration though like trying to blend that smoothly into the rest of the model wouldn't that make that more difficult well it's it's very early up in the design tree so you know the first the first things that I'm defining on a model like this after the basic shape you know hey it's a it's a handgun frame is I'm defining the front strap I'm defining the back strap and I'm defining the thumb Groove because those are the biggest most complicated you know surfacing operations so those go really high in the design tree and those go on you know long before the trigger guard so you see I'm hovering over the trigger guard and you can see it's showing all the surfaces that end up making up this trigger guard but there that's kind of one kind of self-contained thing that's outside of that so you can have major major parametric problems if you try to like Define your uh front strap back strap major you know ergonomic features before you start putting on all of the or sorry after you know you start putting on all these add-ons like trigger guards and you know stuff like this but if you order things correctly basically from like largest most significant features down uh you know I can I I can still change up until the point that I put this um groove on you know for the uh step for defining the stippling up until the point that I put that groove on I can even with everything else built on top of it I mean thousands I mean more than a thousand operations in I mean I'm on face replace number just for face replaces I'm on 761 by the end of this wow that that scares me I don't know I want to try to keep things in the dozens if possible oh no not one not when using those techniques so why do you back why don't you back the tree up someone give people more of a look at the raw model oh yeah for sure he's probably going over most people's heads who haven't worked with this yet um yeah that's an interesting way of doing it using separate bodies and then cutting them and then using face replace like I've used that a couple times but I I tried I use face to replace like I I [ __ ] I know I'm like a crackhead addicted to face or place I use face to replace so [ __ ] much so this this is actually just a uh this is a whatever model so let me uh this isn't like a live model so let me uh let me back it up quite a bit and back it up irreversibly so we can uh do some surfacing on top of it irreversibly what's that mean well I'm just I'm literally just deleting a [ __ ] ton of features because this is this is just a copy saved out it's not like oh yeah it's not actually on my Nas this is oh so here we go that so yeah I was about right so that that pretty much brought us back to you know pretty much just its Primitives it's it's rendering those Services I guess you might you probably have it set to uh render them more coarsely to uh save on processing oh yeah I I you know I I I I know what it's going to look like so here I'm gonna hide these so here's my three big surfaces so let me hide everything except the uh surface that makes the back strap and I'll show you that even when the models at this stage of complexity we can do big ergonomic changes just with the um toggle construction toggle Construction okay here we go there's that sorry I really want to make it so that we're seeing all the right stuff uh super important backstrap oh here we go I actually named it super important backstrap hole offset yeah we'll have that okay that's nice uh so guys in case uh this is being lost on the folks at home Tim is a lot more organized than I am well so I'm doing things that are a lot more uh I would use the word simpler I think it would be appropriate this that you you have a lot more features on your Glock frames than I'm using on lowers or the orc or anything else you have a lot a lot of small features and uh profiles that you have to deal with so here is the all-important backstrap surface that is defining basically like the key ergonomic feature of a gun so your your front strap is important your most important ergonomic feature in a handgun by far is the back strap everything from the bottom of the handle you know the bottom of the grip here up to the end of your beaver tail that's by far like the foundational ergonomic feature of your gun I mean and it it makes perfect sense you know when you think about it for just a second um here I'm gonna just switch over to my camera Focus so not a gun not a gun YouTube Just a just a piece of plastic just just a piece of plastic biodegradable plastic at that so you grip something the web the web of your hand between your thumb and your forefinger is the most sensitive part of your hand like try getting a paper cut you know between your fingers yeah and you're putting that most sensitive part that's where the most sensitive part of your hand interacts and then when you grip something that's the foundation of your grip everything else is built on top of that so you focus on the back strap that's your foundational ergonomic element well welcome back to Hoffman tactical guys in today's video we're going to be doing a two-way 3D development stream on ergonomics ergonomics 101. so I mean hey that's that's what's that's what surfacing is for it's it's it's it's for going from something that's really blocky extrusions to you know something that's actually shaped like a human hand yeah so why do you show people how that surface is made so exactly so I'm I'm let me let me show all my sketches there we go I have a lot of stuff as well screen your share uh oh on the screen again yeah bring it back up there we go so okay so just to kind of get people uh up to speed here what you're looking at this particular surface we're discussing you're using you're thickening it using Boolean operations to actually apply it to the model but all of that kind of is secondary to the to the main instruction here this surface is the profile that you want the final model to be in that area this so here so I'm I'm gonna highlight the sketches that really kind of control this so these are the sketches that are actually controlling this surface so this most foundational element of the gone is really being controlled just just by these three surfaces or Sorry by these by these um five or six I would think nope is it only three it's uh it's it's only three so it's one two three and then one of them is a mirror so yes it's it's four but one of them is just mirrored yeah and I'm actually letting I'm letting the Tail Wag the Dog at the bottom so I'm just letting what I'm controlling on these the tail is just floating it's just an extension the top surface yeah so this this this is where like the guide curve is actually important is this one right at you know the webbing of your hand so I'm letting everything else flow from that I'm just not even like why like why why wouldn't I let the top and the bottom fall naturally from where is Mo from what profile is most comfortable for the webbing of your hand yeah unless yeah in this application that's perfect so how are you keeping that surface tangent with the rest of the grip ah I think that's like well well these these these sketches on the side are co-planner with the rest of the grip so the edge of the surface is going to fall on the same plane yep and then in the actual surfacing operation yep open that up yeah you can you can do a lot of you can define a lot of stuff so this this is you know what here let me let me go this is the best view you've had so far let me go all the way back to the replace phase or the uh subtract operation there so the subtract replace face front strap I'm gonna I'm gonna take this model all the way back to just what we're talking about okay much cleaner our our frame is now looking much more rudimentary so I'm gonna hide this surface real quick and I'm gonna roll back to the subtract operation so I'm going to I'm going to go to toggle to Construction so before this surfacing operation this I mean this is what this is the base of V3 so like you guys have seen V3 and how flipping you know ergonomic it is this you should start off with a solid Extrusion this this is the ergonomic Foundation this is the foundation of it Extrusion very much in the way almost that it would be done in like a mesh type program like a I mean obviously it's it's parametric you're not using a little brush to push and pull but you're starting off with like a block and then you're taking that block and cutting it into where you want it yeah I mean you know like so in this first operation you but you can basically just like draw a Glock and you can set up like your most important elements like I want the grip angle to roughly be this I want you know rails here I want you know a taper you know I want a slight angle here that's going to like bring this up to here and you know at this point I put in some like my significant interior voids like the mag well and the um the front rail block just so I don't cut so deep that I you know infringe on those uh and those they shall not be infringed upon uh so we have we have these sketches and these sketches are controlling this surface the most important ergonomic feature I can control right here just by grabbing this point so this will control the back strap even when the whole model is built on top of it this will still do that subtract operation so I just modified the back strap a bit do you just drag and drop those like sketches where you want them or do you find them with Dimensions to kind of lock them in and then change them later um I don't really use dimensions for ergonomic features okay um why why would you dementia Dimensions have no relationship to ergonomics yeah so I use them kind of more for I like to mention everything once I get once I get it where I want I'll Dimension it and then I kind of like these as a reference so when I want to change it later I kind of know I can put it back or I know how much I'm moving it and then if I want to put it like halfway back I can do that so I I I I don't like I don't like dimensions for ergonomic features it it doesn't like fundamentally make any sense to me right so but it gives you a point of reference to work from when you're making sure but that's that's stupid the only point of reference that matters is the actual point of like because you're not like no one's smart enough like the the system of your hand is a [ __ ] ton of joints a [ __ ] ton of nerves a [ __ ] ton of ligaments well it's based on feel but you print the model out you feel it you see you want to tweak something tweak something here uh change the curve on the back strap a little bit I like to use the dimensions in there that way I can I can go in there and I can move it by by a little bit I'll know how much I moved it and next time I say that's not nearly enough I can move it by twice that I just feel it gives me a better idea of how I'm changing in the model rather than just dragging it and then I have to go back I have to go back to my last version if I want to know how far I moved yeah that's that's that's very contrary to the way that I like to work I I like I like to set my technical constraints so I like to say you know here's my grip angle that I'm targeting you know we're going to Target like a Sig P320 grip angle I want to Target you know obviously it has to be a Glock it it I can't make shapes that are incompatible with its like fundamental glockness that's right yeah you have to that's that's the very basic shape of your frame though that's not any minor uh that's any minor ergonomic part but no but there are why the ergonomics aren't mine or don't don't [ __ ] say that okay no but it's no but like I'm serious it's it's it's the only thing that differentiates what we do from what the rest of the gun industry does like yes yes there is the 3D printing element but that's not an affordance that's not interesting to the object so if you're just talking about the design of the object the only thing that makes us different is our ability to do things that traditional manufacturers can so ergonomics is a big part of that yeah is a huge part of that yeah that's uh that's that's a huge part uh there are some yeah exactly there's other things as well we can do yeah I mean but you know like yeah what what I try to harp on with this stuff and you know I think it's it's it's a lot of what has made me you know like a popular designer in this space is so many people think of 3D printed guns as an end like it's it it's the the means is the end like the whole point of 3D printed guns is two three and that's the only thing that matters right like but that's not really true there's actually more you can do with it well it's it's it's it's true but it there's nothing you can do as a designer to make 3D printed guns more 3D printy like right like it's it's intrinsic to the space so as a designer like you're not going to make a 3D printed gun more 3D printable like sure yeah like the fgc stuff like that but like you're not going to fundamental you're not going to make it more like you're not going to make a Glock you're not going to make a Glock more 3D printable I mean well I just mean like um within the scope of the project it's not going to uh you have to if you want to do something that's better than another frame or an older previous frame that was out there you have to actually do something better and and ergonomics is where you're doing that well in product is on school we have like a fancy you know like you know academic word for it and it's it's called an affordance so like the price of an object isn't an affordance the cost you know like the the regulatory stuff around an object that's not an affordance so the fact that 3D printed guns can be you know unregulated and like people have better access to them that's actually not like that's not an intristic property of them that's a property around them and so people often don't disentangle the object from the prop you know the all the other things around the object how much does this object cost how easy is it to get how Dirt you know how how long it lasts like that those aren't you know well those some of those could be uh tangently connected you know durability is sure sure that's that's that that's a bad one that is a that is a property of an object but like that's not I I meant that more in the sense like hey did this person printed out of uh good pla plus yeah printed out of like ABS yeah that's not that's that's not a property of the design so what can you do just with design to make it better you know like how can you compete with guns that come off an assembly line on affordances because it's not going to be durability and now like access and cost aren't factors if you're just thinking about affordances you have to Target things that you you have to Target better ergonomics you have to Target Innovative things like you know the stipples or just like crazy stuff that manufacturers would never do like you know people laugh at like the glong and like meme guns like that but they're actually incredibly important and demonstrate like actually pretty Advanced product design thinking because they're actually doing something that you can't do with with injections yeah without lots of yeah without without lots of cost and uh it's something that would never actually happen yeah exactly commercial environment exactly so like these these things seem like tangential to like the mission of like 3D printed guns but from like a product design perspective they're actually really the only thing that matters like if you're thinking like how do you design 3D printed guns they're they're actually the only thing that you should be thinking about is what can this do that a store-bought gun can't because that's besides weird Libertarians you know and people who well I mean with a project normally when you're starting a project you have a set of project goals that you want to meet when you're setting those goals certainly if if you are trying to compete with a off-the-shelf gun trying to make it better is going to be one of those it's going to be a very high in that list of goals uh but I mean your goals can be different you could be trying to make it more accessible uh or basically more accessible or higher performance compared to off-the-shelf guns so it's kind of one but but those aren't product design goals those are engineering goals okay I mixed it too but okay no but but that's fine like we're this is like why talking to you is always so interesting because like you and I have very similar like values about this stuff like we we see things in a very similar way but we come at you know we come in a very different perspective totally a harder [ __ ] one eight very very different perspective I mean here we are using Boolean operations I mean those are scaring me like but here's the thing like we can we can have a high level conversation about like CAD that flies over most people's heads even though like you know are you guys getting this hey I'm sorry I I I've been totally dominating this but no no I've been letting you talk on this I think that's an important subject I think it's a good little it's a good little piece there about affordances uh which is one of one of Chairman's favorite words by the way if you guys didn't know uh it is one of his favorites not his most but one of his let me make you big again we we we just modified this surface this entire surface the most important feature of this gun just by dragging the curve in this one sketch and I'll actually I'll actually pull it back even farther to show like how I actually apply these two frames why don't you open the surface feature up so that people can kind of see the different I don't know how if it highlights it SolidWorks highlights everything in a really easy to see way yeah this this does too so let me uh let me do that so let me uh unroll those back and I will delete everything up until the surface point so here's my definitions in the surface so you can see that it's defined by these four sketches yes so the weight so for those who are totally not familiar with with CAD the way it works in parametric modeling like this in most cases is everything is defined by sketches which are just lines uh curved lines they can be on a 2d or three they can be a two-dimensional or three-dimensional plane in this case I think all your lines are on a two-dimensional plane right yes yeah I I I I I three 3D sketching sounds impressive but really it's just 2D sketching with less control it basically so it's normally 3D sketching the only stuff I do and I have a couple of them you're just basically mixing different sketches from different Planes together just to get the curve you're looking for um yeah it basically it's basically just a compound sketch um solid Edge has that capability I never use it because it it you know it it always seems to uh it always seems to break for me so it yeah I I use I use it very sparingly sometimes it just is Handy to do that but uh it 3D sketches do tend to break pretty quickly but in this case here all your sketches are two-dimensional and you're basically just the Sketchers are you can think of the sketches as being the backbone of the surface exactly backbone and then the ribs and that and then the the cab the software fills the sketch in inside of that profile and then if you open the well here let me let me I'll I'll make I'll just remake this surface so let me go eat the surface so in in solid Edge it's called like your your all-purpose surfacing two is a tool is called Blue surf so it's basically you know a combo like Loft uh you know it's it's your all-purpose surfacing tool so I'm going to select interesting you have a special tool just for that so I'm gonna select my three I'm gonna select my three kind of like rib sketches oh and you can blue surf from anything so do you you don't go ahead yeah so you don't just have to Blue surf from sketches you can blue surf from any any uh intersection or line or or yeah you could any Vector kind of well that's yeah you could you can blue surf from any element of your model so you can run a blue surf like that you know if it's geometry if it can be defined as an edge you can blue surf from it and you can mix so you can you can blue surf combinations of you know stuff that's defined by sketches and stuff that's defined by uh you know other elements of solid geometry so same and same inside work so you do you not have separate like uh in SolidWorks the surfacing tool I use for everything is called a boundary surface and it looks very similar to this that's that's that's the second thing here is bounded um but bounded is more well bounded has to be closed uh blue surfs can be open um um okay so bounded surfaces in they have to at least have three sides um that's interesting SolidWorks you can have two sides as long as you can Define it um I I know what you mean so yeah we it's interesting that it's different because in SolidWorks we have boundary surfaces and then we have lofted surfaces which is like a neutered boundary surface I don't know why they exist like but and then uh and then obviously there's some more basic Extrusion surface tools but uh you you were you were asking how I keep the edges tangent so it's giving me these little Pips on my Edge on my Edge sketches so I'm gonna say parallel to section and parallel to sections so that'll keep the surfaces tangent at the ends to this plane and this plane so you're making the surface tangent to the other geometry yeah exactly or well it's more specifically tangent to the paint the planes that those sketches are defined upon yeah yeah so now now yeah yeah that makes sense and you can also go perpendicular uh if you wanted to and stuff like that yeah no so yeah parallel or normal uh so or or you can do like an auto like natural thing that's kind of like a uh you know Auto Select uh which actually works you know most of the time but generally if I'm defining like a foundational feature like this I'm I'm going to lock everything down uh and then we have this uh control curve here that we're going to bring in through this guide curve step and so we're going to select that control curve this is a weird workflow and you can see that pops it in so now I have my Surface I'm just going to uh finish that surface okay so we have this great surface and now we need to basically apply it to this model so the easiest way to do that would be this tool called replace space so replace space is what it sounds like it replaces one face with another face so let's try it hey maybe it'll work so let's select this back face hit enter and try to replace the face hey it worked it worked so we don't even have to do that Boolean operation but sometimes it doesn't work like let's try this uh front strap this front strap is made up of more than one surface so let's select both of them and then we'll select that that surface right there ah shocks it didn't work ah rats gosh darn it I'm I'm I'm flipping hopping mad but we have this surface defining this front strap so hey let's see let's let's let's try to apply this front strap another way so I'm gonna go straight to a thickening operation I'm going to select that and I'll thicken it I don't know like 15 millimeters I don't know it's probably too much for those who don't know is once you design a surface uh whatever that surface is you can uh thicken that surface and it does exactly that it takes the surface and then it just thickens It Out by how much you define and that's actually what I use for most of my built-in support I designed for my lowers I designed the support as a surface all those nice curves and stuff that's a surface designed much like chairman just designed his back strap surface and then I'll thicken it out to the thickness that I want and that makes a very very uniform piece of support support material that as long as it doesn't get too steep of an angle it prints quite nicely um so that's what thickening is okay so we have this thickened surface but you can see the bottom Edge is kind of like not good it's not actually subtracting everything it's not covering all the geometry that we eventually want to subtract so you you probably thicken the surface normal to the surface rather than a particular direction Vector right yeah so let me you know I can um I can just I can just extend the surface so that's you're doing an offset and then a face replace yeah and you know I mean there's a million ways you can do it um see all of this little stuff here just seems like it gets creates so many buggy little problems later though no but the nice thing is because this is is it this is its own design body you don't care well it's it's totally separate from the rest of the model it has no relation to the rest of the model so you never have to cut it or worry about those features again basically yeah why why would you it's it's separate like this is its own separate body that I can deal with separately it's not it's not linked it's only linked to the main body is through its originating sketches no it's not linked to the main body through its originating sketches so how are those sketches defined well I mean they they might be defined from planes that I'm initially grabbing off the main body but like I'm that's the main body foundational feature which I'm never rolling back so it doesn't matter but like I can Define them just with you know planes that are defined as an offset from you know my coordinate system but it doesn't matter because I'm never actually like yes it would matter if I deleted this like initial protrusion like if I deleted this sketch and rolled back this initial protrusion yes it would matter but I'd never do that so does that initial sketch not have any dimensions on it no no none so where are you where are you getting your grip angle from here I'm glad you asked oh you're using you're using solid Edge solid Edge black magic here I am so let me let me show you that so let me know this is what this is what I just this stuff just makes my my skin crawl this like referencing it seems so easy to make a mistake or not have everything it's witchcraft guys I want everything to be under complete positive dimensional control alrighty so here's an assembly and um I'll just open up a reference file that I know is good uh 19. so here's one of my V2 19s so all of this stuff is in the same assembly oh wait sorry uh all of this stuff is in the same assembly um and you have a bunch of references you have a bunch of other other geometry in here oh yeah I mean show all I mean yeah I have a ton of different models that I'm taking little bits and pieces that I like out of for reference yeah and the stuff that I take can be actual geometry it can just be a line here or a curve there but I I line it all up using like the pinholes and then so do you at least use like mating tools to lock the pinholes together yeah [ __ ] yeah dude all those shit's locked down like none of this [ __ ] can like drift or move good good I'm just making sure you never know hey sorry I'm just gonna I'm gonna go to camera Focus again real quick just so I don't docs myself so I'll show you how I do that so basically any Glock model that I make myself you know anything that's homemade I use a uh a common reference um I use a common coordinate system for all of my glock models so I can lock these models together just by assembly just by assembling to but just by assembling them to that coordinate system but yeah when I'm making this initial sketch this is probably exactly what I did so I'm in my sketching tool and it's just my sketch oh cool you just traced out the other the other part yeah so you know oh hey there's my there's my well not visually I mean I'm using actual like so I can use this project to sketch tool to actually grab the exact geometry but it doesn't look like you did well no because it's a different it's I mean it's it's a different um it's a different design so stuff isn't you know exactly in the same place but like actually there are places that I did that's that's the exact same angle as that the top is yes that's the exact same line there I changed this a little bit but it's it's coming off you know right there foreign so yeah this is something that in SolidWorks it's set up differently um yeah so I want to say I could you could do something kind of like this but it's not really designed for it I could bring geometry in and mess it if I wanted to like separate reference geometry but it it's not I've never done that before so yeah I'm like so like so this is this is my totally normal workflow I'm like working with my model like and then I can just hit a hotkey and be like okay so you know am I close to my reference am I not close to my reference like for this I don't want to be close to my reference I'm trying to change the grip angle base you know from my V2 so yeah that's you know I know how my V2 looks and feels so I know that that's a good change from that V2 right like that's that's the type of change I'm looking for and then okay hide it I'm back to work so then hey look we have this uh we have this you know design surface here we have that and so basically to so this this is what we were talking about it's like hey where do these touch that's why it's so robust it only touches in one place the sketches don't actually touch this design body it touches this design body and then this design body and the main you know model only interact like they only intersect at this one operation and that operation is just a very sorry I'm still in my uh am I in that I'm in surfacing them yeah so they only intersect with the subtract operation so I'm saying hey here's my design body and I want to subtract this design body bada bing bada boom I'm sorry let me hide the surface so you can actually see that and now you have uh kind of your grip laid out and uh got some holes there yeah I got some holes so you know so we we rolled back to a way earlier feature so I obviously uh I I obviously changed that at a certain point yeah that is interesting it just seems like a very uh chaotic way of doing it though yeah I went to Art School my dude okay I think I think somewhere back here in the chat we have the perfect comment for that it's um something about chairman chairman being a some some art yeah it's an art school reference so yeah affordances uh well hey let me let me surrender my uh okay and let's take it back to you will you give me uh will you give me 45 seconds to uh refresh refresh my sake glass absolutely go ahead thank you sir okay all right so I don't want you guys capture any of that that was interesting so chairman has a very chaotic way of doing modeling way scary if you ask me if you can't hear me um but uh that's that's what he does let me share my screen here and uh boom so I can do that I can uh let's see um let's go solo layout and then let's go add to screen there we go okay well that's good enough all right so and we'll jump into these comments here guys in just a minute and uh we and you guys have some good questions in there so this is the latest lower receiver uh version for lower receiver I am working on AR-15 lower receiver here and this is all surface as you can see and I'm doing this um because I want to try to improve the ergonomics and also uh the support rib and just trying to make everything a little bit more streamlined so to give you an idea of uh what we're talking about uh obviously uh chairman gave you guys uh interesting little overview there of kind of what surface is and the different ways he's using it obviously we work we spent like four to five minutes going into some very esoteric stuff probably you guys got pretty bored there but um that's okay let's uh jump back to I'm in my model here let's look at the pistol the pistol grip so this right here is the body by the way guys let's just if you let me know put uh put sevens in the chat if if the audio is good here I'm getting a little bit of reverberation I don't know if it's good or not so let me know stick Seven's in the chat there just to verify our audio is good and uh Odyssey if you guys on Odyssey would put some sevens in there just let me know it's working over there as well I don't know if it's too loud or too quiet looks like we're good looks like we're good on YouTube and we got Vega oh let's go to Odyssey and YouTube okay perfect thanks guys perfect okay so hopping back over here into SolidWorks real quick we are looking at um our our uh we're gonna look at how I how I designed the pistol grip so the first thing I have I have this lower body right here I have an area where I'm going to attach the pistol grip obviously I have this cut out area how I got that was an earlier step I had to work up to but then the pistol grip itself is let's come in here the basic body of the pistol grip is defined by this one this one surface right here it's a boundary surface and it's defined by a few different sketches so I'm just going to back up those sketches bring this down sorry I thought I was still backstage for a second sorry sorry I'm just watching okay yeah I know you're uh you're there I'm trying to figure out how I can like bring I'm trying to figure out how I can like uh single me out I I have the I don't have it set up super well in my end I have to try to figure that out well oh yeah oh yeah there you go perfect yeah I had to find the right the right selection okay so um the piss I have a whole bunch let me just hide this all this other stuff here I have a bunch of stuff I was working on I've exposed okay so just the basic grip body is what we're looking at is what we're looking at right here and I'll even hide this right uh actually let's not hide that never mind okay so this is the basic the basic pistol grip body so what I what I did is I have right down the middle on the center the the I have a plane right on the middle by part right on that plane I've drawn the basic sketch it's this sketch right here and this sketch and it is fully dimensioned are you really did you really Dimension the hell out of that stuff okay it's uh it's fully dimensioned as necessary uh and this and this has all of the the I can tweak everything here really easily I don't have to drag anything I can come in here I can I can tweak angles I can change how much this this toes in at the bottom here so this is the this is the basic front end and back end profiles for my pistol grip so obviously this is the profile for the back strap and it's just got this uh this this curve right here this is the profile for the front of my grip and then uh up above we have this curve right here and then this little curve over here on the front end or for the for the second surfacing operation which connects the grip to the lower body itself and um that's this is kind of the uh the backbone of the grip so to speak and then if we hop out of there and we jump into our other two sketches these are kind of what you could think of as the ribs of the grip this here is uh the bottom and this is also just this is just a spline uh this is just a spline that that defines the curve of how I want my grip shaped what's that 0.550 Dimension what are you what are you even referencing towards the center there oh that's that's the center plane this is reference off the center plane oh okay gotcha gotcha no no but what what what like that's not that isn't a point on your spline what's it that okay so this is a style spline so it's the style spine is defined by these tangent uh construction lines you see these tangent construction lines yeah yeah I see that over here yeah so it's I'm just defining the construction lines and the spline kind of sits tangent to those lines obviously this is this is a uh Five Point spline so it's not actually tangent to the inner the two intermediate lines but uh okay that makes sense yeah it's a spot it's a style spline so there's a few different styles of splines this is the one that's the least buggy and the easiest to work with I found so I I this is the one I you now use basically for everything unless I need like some special matching the curvature or something else or something but for most work that that works great um and then I add another support rib to the top end up here and not a support rib a uh basically just another rib to form it and this is just another another spline and I can I can change the shape if it I want I can make the front yeah it's it's in solid Edge parlance we would call those guide curves so you're connecting like you're you have your construction you know sketches that control you know like hey the surface is going from this curve to this curve and then the guide curves guide the surface kind of along going between those Okay so I'll show you the Tool uh the tool in in a second the uh the boundary surface but basically you just have you have surfaces that run one way like the x-axis surfaces and the y-axis surfaces that's not what they call them but that's basically what it is so I just called so with this tool could you have a third a third guide curve in the middle oh yeah you can stack up as many as you want as long as they all um would that make it two separate surfaces or would that still be one surface one surface oh okay cool yeah that that's pretty much like how blue surf works okay yeah it's they seem to use different terminology basically um I'll open the tool up and I'll open the tulip in a second so um that's basically the ribs and then you can see I've added another one of these kind of backbone curves right here and this curve is just based off of uh I I put a plane in there there's a plane right here and this sketch is just built on this uh plane I've installed and this plane is dimensioned off the other sketches you see there's a line right there this line in my primary uh sketch defines that surface and then I've drawn this sketch on that surface and this sketch kind of defines how much the grip bows out on the sides so this is kind of the same as the front and back curves looked at originally except this is the side curve and I'm basically just using these curves to make a bounding box of sorts of where I want my Surface to be and then when I actually use the surfacing tool it fills in let me bring down to the tool just a second there we go it just fills in that that box and smoothly connects all of those curves all of those sketches together to actually make the surface and I'll open up that tool edit feature and um oh yeah so yeah there we go normal to profile yeah yeah exactly the same thing so you can see here I have Direction one and Direction two over here on my uh in the tool itself so Direction one I in this particular case I have it set up normally I'll set Direction one up as like the ribs so I have the top and bottom here and then the the lines that connect those ribs together are uh are what I use for direction two but that's totally arbitrary the way I do it it doesn't really matter but what you're doing the way this tool works is in Direction one I'm just putting in all of the lines uh going in One Direction and then Direction two is just the lines that kind of connect those lines together and you can see I've got the top and bottom uh lines right there the curve uh the sketches and then under Direction two I just have the front the back and then I have uh the side right there and it just fills them all together and then as we mentioned the uh let me turn my camera back on it's gone to sleep for some reason looks like uh chairman has some extremely active dogs in the background they're actually yeah they're super yeah Super Active dogs well um I've set this up right here to be normal to the sketch uh so the Curve comes down and meets the sketch on the sketch um on the back strap right here and on the front area and I've just set it to be normal to profile so it's just normal to that sketch what's interesting in SolidWorks is I actually can't set that I can't set that to be uh parallel or tangent to the surface that the sketch is drawn on I actually have to have a surface there in order to make it uh tangent to that's something that's interesting I don't have that feature in SolidWorks you know I I I I don't know if that's necessarily the case because you're fully constraining your sketches with like Dimensions so it might just be that I think that would make a difference though I mean it gives me basically my options are um I can make it normal to the pro I'll show you in a second I can make it normal to the profile or I can make it uh have some relationship with the surface that it's meeting with and when I connect to the lower body I can do that but in general if I'm connecting to a sketch um I can't tell it to be uh uh I can't tell it to be parallel or I can't tell it to be tangent with the sketch as in as in the context of the surface that the sketch is drawn on I have to actually have a surface there for it to be tangent two I can't just randomly say it to be tangent and it'll just jump to the tangent level of that sketch that's something interesting in in this sketch it makes perfect sense because well here I can't because the way I have it defined you couldn't do that and yeah it would fail yeah um but in other sketches I it's not an option really either I just thought that was funny how they have that separately done now one other thing here with uh with surfaces so I think most people can see how I have these surfaces set up and uh I I think it's it's pretty straightforward actually once you know what you want to do you're just defining the kind of the back bit bone ribs and then there's some other functionality like in in SolidWorks I can adjust the what they call the tangent influence huh that's that that's a new one to me I haven't heard of that so what is it what what is that control basically it's uh I don't know if this is a pork I have this this surface really well defines as a poor example but it basically adjusts how tangent It is Well it adjusts the um how much the curvature follows that particular curve throughout the surface so if I I don't know if you'll see it here if I take this it makes sense it's how much that tangent is you can see it over here and this is one of the this is one of the things which a lot of people don't like with surfaces and I see why people don't like it I don't really have a problem with it but it's one of those things where it's like if I bring this down to zero you'll see the surface over here yeah you'll see it changes and basically what's happening there is it's um yeah I get it it's so it's it's it's how how basically how long the influence lasts yeah it's basically the gradient of the influence yeah so so generally speaking making that number larger results in a smoother surface where you get kind of more of an average of all your lines like it's it averages them together and blends everything really well I'm gonna have to play around with those some of my solidwork stuff because uh but that's that I like the idea of that that's that's a feature I wish I had in solid Edge that's fine I don't wonder how solid Edge handle because it has to handle that somehow it still has to it still has to connect all those lines together and create a surface so in some cases if I if I brought that on a zero the surface would get like lumpier around the curves and it wouldn't be super smooth because it's not it's not taking that influence and stretching it far enough the problem with that factor is it's like totally objective I'm just dragging it looking at it and there's no I'm not even sure exactly what it's doing I'm just looking at the surface and looking at the result yeah when when I get that classic like oh like I ended up with a lumpy surface I just have to like redefine and add like different guide curves I don't have like I still have to do that yeah I still have to do that this just can help this can help work that out somewhat yeah that's that's I I I I I I I [ __ ] I get it like I I get why that's [ __ ] so you don't have that inside I don't have that I don't do it okay so this is what's weird so solid Edge you have like this weird blue surf tool don't call it weird blue so far well it's weird because I I thought I have a list of very concise tools up here surfacing tools I have the Bound for your surface tool you just looked at I also have the lofted surface tool which I have I have Loft and I have boundaries and Boundary works the same way but like okay okay draw draw just like three just take like three sketches with no guide curves just sketches like just sketches what if I oh let me let me just just three like can you just do this with like random edges like just take your boundary tool and just like let's see what we can do boundary tool I'll try to go uh just single sketches let's go to that guy and let's just it should connect them together let's go flip connectors yeah see and there's the surface yeah it doesn't have it just takes those and puts them together and I I don't even have to have anything in the direction toolbox I can I can generate that surface and boom there's that surface obviously these are just two straight edges and just connecting them together but it's it seems to me that it doesn't it doesn't require a fully bounded surface yeah it does yeah I don't like why they call it boundary surface it's a weird name but it doesn't it's all it requires is just something to work with and it'll it'll put a surface there if it can actually get a valid surface geometry so it's about super bounded surfaces and blue surfs work differently in solid Edge but I feel it might be something so it might be equivalent to the SolidWorks filled surface so a filled surface requires the surface to be uh cohesive it requires all sides of that surface to even if it's a three-dimensional sketch it'll take up if you have a sketch that looks like like a potato chip as long as it's defined in all sides if I use the filled surface tool it will fill that surface and create a curved surface inside of that okay big here so you can see this let's go solo layout there we go okay so if I want to make like if I basically want to like fill in like down here to up here and like kind of like just that I wouldn't want to do that but let's just say I want to do that have you been downgraded to to uh 420 or or 360p uh that's just you I'm still seeing it fine in stream yard it's looking I mean it looks I'm looking over at YouTube and it's fuzzier than it was a second ago I don't know if it's done it's jumped or something it looks better now it looks better now okay that was weird so if I'm making a bounded surface or sorry let me start with a bounded surface tool so I select one vertices and then another vertices and it's like yeah they don't form a closed loop so in in solid Edge the bounded surface is for working with closed glutes I can see the symbol there that that you're looking at in the bounded surface tool how much control do you have over that surface like so it sounds like I can add guide Curves in the bounded surface ah okay so um if if I wanted to like add a so like let's say so you wanted to make a dome let's say you had like a disc you wanted to make it domed okay surface uh yes okay so it sounds like your bounded surface is very similar to SolidWorks what they call a filled surface so let's say I come in here and put a sketch on the midpoint and draw just like a tangent Arc uh come on an arc by three points why not uh that's a great Arc I love that Arc I never I've used that a little bit but like three-point Arch or like I don't know I've never really found them that handy so now I'm going to make a bounded surface and I'm gonna say I'm going to select a chain there we go and then say cool for that selection and then I'm going to select that as a guide curve yeah okay yeah yeah I see what you mean so it's it yeah okay that that's the same tool as the SolidWorks filled surface tool then they're just so the boundary surface tool installer works is is equivalent to your blue surf tool they're just screwing around with names that's all I see exactly what that is so you're just you're you have you're Cur you're defining an initial uh Surface by a a closed sketch and then you can deform that as you like with guide curves yeah more or less yeah that's okay that's what that is that's that's the that's the filled surface equivalent and then I can yeah just like replace space that out and uh whoa that's some uh [ __ ] up looking geometry yeah it's a nice little bulge there in your Glock very appropriate uh whoa no that's that's inappropriate sir and then you know that's because everything's you know parametric I can say you know hey whoa whoa playing step uh let's put that there okey dokey and then yeah bulge myths so you know it's handy uh I I do use the the solid Edge bound tool quite a bit but uh not nearly as much as that uh that blue surf tool okay yeah so so the blue surf I would say is equivalent then to uh that makes sense yeah they're they're so yeah because there's there's no filled surface tool in solid Edge so boundaries through Surf and blues and filled is bound what I don't understand yeah is it just it just shifted over what I don't understand is the purpose of the lofted surface tool I found it to maybe be a little bit smoother with the surfaces it generates like if they're less I've literally never used it in my entire life I don't use it at all I've used it a couple times originally just because hey I've used solid loss before so why don't I use a lofted surface but it has it has no purpose it just it's about you can I can just connect her I can just Loft curves and blue surfs yeah all day like what the [ __ ] I mean you just you're defining curves but with two different directions of sketches basically the same as in SolidWorks there's no purpose behind the lofted surface tool which is which is yeah I don't know why it exists yeah what's up with sevens in the chat is that like no no so so that's that was an audio check I told people to put sevens in the chat why sevens that's I that's just the number to use um that's the cool number to use I feel like I feel like for you it should be it should be one in the chat um ones is like it's like an inconvenient spot on the keyboard people's hands are kind of in the middle just make them go to the sevens yeah but I mean you know I mean it's hydrogen my man you know we're we're hydrogen Bros you know that's that's actually H2 so hydrogen is is one on the periodic table my dude what in real life the hydrogen's there so what's the what's what's the elemental number for hydrogen oh my goodness it's um it's it's very very close to one I hate I actually don't know I actually don't know the exact amount it's more than one I want to say it's a little more than one yeah God damn it I should have gone to [ __ ] hydrogen School yeah I want to say a little more it's um I don't know those are those atomic things are not super you got to know the the gross the gross densities what's important at different pressures sorry for the tension let's go back to your model yeah sorry about that guys we're uh let me just uh momentarily let's just there we go so uh yeah sorry about that sorry about that uh well it's not sorry for the tangent sorry for the normal yeah yeah so um yeah okay let's we'll jump back in uh to something a little more appropriate there we go and um Okay so let's talk let's respond to some comments here believe it or not we're actually over an hour into the stream now we're like more than halfway through uh I was just gonna run to 10. so let's let's go through here I'm gonna go over to Odyssey that's the chat that's that's what we are prioritizing I cannot highlight Odyssey comments unfortunately guys but I can respond to them why don't you why don't you share your screen so we can uh see the Odyssey comments exactly um I can respond to them I actually did that like there's a way of going full screen this is my favorite comment that I've seen so far I'm a fusion 360. this is I saw that over my head so I'm curious go Fusion 360 has surfacing tools of some sort I thought um yeah they just [ __ ] suck so here's the big thing so here like I I call it like real Cad and fake CAD so like cat has been around for a [ __ ] long time it's a stupid like 50 plus years kind of a thing it's just and it's actually like there there's CAD software out there that's an unbroken chain of software development um for for 20 30 40 50 years seriously it's it's so ridiculous that I've been funny so you have these programs like uh you know Katia NX solid Edge SolidWorks um to some extent actually Autodesk Inventor um [ __ ] uh that's all I can think about the top of my but you know you have these like programs that are that are real CAD that basically and they're buggy as hell like you get you get problems but you also get like extreme capability like you're you're using servicing tools that have been refined for a very long time you're using tools that so I feel like somebody needs that needs to take all these tools Port them into a new program from scratch honestly three years working on it fix all the bugs and and then let's run it on our desktops directly from the machine language no operating system so not not not not machine language but uh I've actually I've been playing around with it I haven't really done anything serious with it yet but I have been playing around with iron CAD I've heard of it and they know they make a lot of outrageous claims uh so far it seems pretty good uh is it is it parametric yeah oh really it's it's it actually seems like a [ __ ] like real competitor I'm I'm very interested and I had to look at it they've been advertising a lot on a little while ago on Twitter actually you know I actually I actually saw it so I I heard about it from uh some of like my vendors and you know like my work life and you know they were raving about it and you know if my vendor is raving about a software package that costs half of what I'm already buying from them like I know it's probably pretty good yeah so no no one likes to you know sell themselves out of out of you know twice the commission now what does it uh yeah I should I should I've seen it advertise I've seen like some of I've seen it used um let's see you know I haven't no I actually I've seen it advertised I haven't really looked into it in great detail that is interesting so it doesn't have similar surfacing tools or is it like it's quite unique it's very no it's very similar to solid Edge and SolidWorks it's just kind of like have you like have you like written in like uh a Tesla is a bad example because I actually don't really like Teslas but like I haven't so but you you you're riding one and you start using the stuff and you're like oh like they built this from the ground up recently like yeah it might not be all there like it might not be a hundred percent of the way there but like it's pretty much there and like they're trying to start fresh eliminate all the old problems and like and and and uh basically do a full reset of so yeah they're based entire system they're basically trying to do what Fusion 360 did but in my opinion a lot more successfully it's a lot like it's it's the it's the only like from fresh CAD program that I've seen that actually seems feature complete compared to like solid Edge SolidWorks NX what is the uh their licensing setup like is it a monthly thing can you buy it we understand um but I will definitely look into that uh and uh that is interesting because there's there's so limited number of good options for cat available it's the it's it's the only attempt that I I mean I I try a new cat all the time because like you know I I don't I've met those people who are you know 60 years old and still swearing up and down that like you know AutoCAD is the best thing since less spread you know I I I I'm I'm I'm I suddenly find myself in my 30s I don't want to be that guy in like 20 years being like Oh yeah solid age back in my day we had real CAD you know okay it's your chairman at 50 or 60. it's pretty it's pretty scary uh yeah I will uh I will definitely look into that I've mentioned I saw it and I I just saw like some of their advertisements and they seem a little over the top like the easiest to use CAD ever kind of thing yeah that's [ __ ] that's that's [ __ ] stupid but I wouldn't uh don't dismiss it okay trying it out it actually uh it it it's the it's the only like new from like you know hey we're gonna like do this from scratch you know CAD program that was it bug is it like more stable I I don't think I've had a single crash [ __ ] around with it but I also have I also but I also haven't done like serious stuff with it like you haven't pushed it yet yeah I haven't pushed it yet I will definitely check that out I've I've just been [ __ ] around with it but it seems to have all the features that like I want in like a modern CAD program that is interesting I mean there is there is something to be said about getting away from like the Legacy code base yeah and I I think I I think that's a huge the Legacy code base is a huge problem I think because it's you're dealing with problems that are like just deeply nested inside of decades worth of buggy software exactly but like the problem is like everyone who's tried it so far like hasn't gotten like the feature completeness so I'd rather like have the features that I need and put up with the occasional crash but if someone can give me the best of both worlds like I'm not you know I'm not a [ __ ] like solid Edge Boomer I'm not gonna you know I'm not gonna live and die by some [ __ ] like German multi-national [ __ ] like companies Corporation yeah yeah that like doesn't you know give a [ __ ] yeah no that that's a good way of looking at it I I am very very much not loyal to sod works just because well you know why um it's very unstable and I don't like the company and many reasons so I I am open to otherwise I'll definitely look at iron cat I'm I'm very interested in other Alternatives in it I wish there was more Linux alternatives which would be interesting not having to run on Windows but there aren't honestly they don't exist as far as I can tell I couldn't [ __ ] care less I know people are like you know people people are mad like people get mad at me that I'm like yeah you know I'm just gonna use Windows for everything but like well I use Windows everything because it makes the most sense but if I could use a more stripped down much a more optimized operating system which Windows unfortunately is not um I mean that would be better I'd have better performance so that would be nice but it's just not an option unfortunately this is the only consumer Linux product that's actually running desktop Linux that I've ever purchased that's actually been good and it totally [ __ ] like if if valve can save Linux and like get software support actually working I'd love to [ __ ] switch from Windows but like you know yeah it's very much not a user intuitive thing right now well no it's not just that it's just like you know hey man like I'm not like a I'm not a system admin I'm not I don't do I know I don't do exactly that's what I'm saying it's not it's not it's not super user and that's my problem with it it's not I'm not a computer guy at all so I'm just saying like I I put food on my [ __ ] table doing CAD which yeah is all windows so like I'm not gonna take a principled stand on my [ __ ] operating system choice and like it'll be more of if it was an option would be more of a performance Choice um but if it's just it's a moot point because currently there are no good window non-windows cat programs there are there is not a single native Linux CAD program that is any [ __ ] good sounds NX stops supporting uh Linux yeah yep which is uh yeah I mean so Windows is really the only option right now I use Linux a bunch like we we have two or three Linux machines in this house my wife and I both use Linux Ultrabooks like I have a [ __ ] I have Linux Chopsticks chairman chairman trying to try to walk back his his windows chilling now this is my daily driver for like seven years [ __ ] x201 Linux machine like no [ __ ] trackpad clip Mouse only like I use Linux people just not for [ __ ] classes I'm not stupid you don't really have the choice okay so to jump into these these Odyssey comments uh we have some gooder ones here so um miscellaneous or miscellaneous things for now uh says good stuff could this be done in blender no can the end result be done in blender yes it's not different or there's an equivalent plastic blender so blender is a mesh based system which is completely different and uh it's completely different the way I describe the way I describe it to people who are new to this working with Clay rather than like working with saws and tape measures so you know most people are familiar with like vectors when it comes to like an image file like you download a uh a logo offline and it's like an SVG or something like that and you can keep zooming into it and it never gets pixely and that's because it's made out of math like those you know shapes are being defined as like circles and curves and math a JPEG is defined as a [ __ ] ton of pixels like every you know you zoom in on any picture and the brute force method it gets pixely like uh Hoffman is looking a little pixely on my screen right now that's because he's made out of pixels you keep zooming in and uh it's pixels so a mesh based model is pixels for 3D modeling like they're triangles not squares but it's the same concept There's an actual resolution and it's like made up of you know uh pixels the type of modeling that uh Hoffman and I actually use so like what you'd get from like a step something like that it's called nurbs modeling and I have no idea what nurb stands for do you you should I'm sure you'd oh seriously I have no not a clue I had no idea how the back end works but you're clever whatever it is but but that yeah it's made up based on it's based on on everything is mathematically defined yeah uh all your curves all your positions so that makes it so that you can it's much more repeatable you can do actual Precision Parts with it if you choose to do so uh with mesh based modeling you're you're just basically working imagine working with clay with your hands kind of a thing I mean you can you can add in some Precision geometry like if the system can generate things like cubes or spheres that's normally a feature but it's not it's completely different and would be would it be possible to do a Glock frame with in blender it probably would be actually I mean talk talk to Phil like he makes great frames just working in meshes but you know yeah it's not fun though I I maybe he finds it fun I don't know I wouldn't find it fun it's not it's not it's and it's really hard to change things later so basically the short answer is no yeah now uh Vega Holdings does say down here in response uh over on Odyssey let me make Odyssey big again uh that there is a parametric design plug-in for blender I have no idea what that looks like sounds scary but I mean maybe it's worth looking at uh just to play with uh coming down foreign let's see black [ __ ] your broke ass has the Pirate Bay my dude Splendor ah black sight my broke ass has to use blender law um so chairman says to sell this sale you know on the ocean and not not the ocean you're thinking of not the uh not the odd ocean okay so we have our sevens in the chat oh sevens are appropriate oceans and sevens okay I fully endorse piracy for expensive CAD systems that is everything I say is legal advice [ __ ] you um let's see what other good comments we have in here I spotted a couple um uh Be Free or Die Trying says uh CAD has been around since cardboard okay that's uh cardboard aided design I love it okay yeah it's um nice it's a good perspective on things okay um let's say uh more I think here is more of a design question from Marcus uh aerulius have just pronounced that um he says you made the lower and pistol grip on the Orca one solid piece for strength and durability reasons were there constraints unique to the Orca that that that made this idea or in your opinion would all 3d2a prints uh with pistol grip configurations benefit from consolidating going forward so what he's asking here is is an integrated pistol grip on uh AR style type lowers better than having it separate I would say yes I I I I completely agree it so customization I mean there's some arguments against it but from a strictly from a structural perspective there's no arguments against it in 3D printing because you can because you can customize yourself well but that's not if the designer only like me for example I only released one orca yeah you you release the stats like yeah and the native file so someone could go edit it but they can't just like just someone off the street who has no CAD modeling skills or anything can't just go grab a different grip they like printing yeah about that yeah but sure but they couldn't like make that grip they like either so no I agree yeah so it's I think it's that's a very minor detraction uh and the advantages of strength and the ability for the designer to improve ergonomics over the constraints of a standard you can do a lot more molding it all together yeah and AR a standard AR grip just the way it attaches is actually kind of sucky for ergos it's like the your fingers your finger rest position is way too low uh for once yeah it's it's it's it's weird how the AR was so ahead of its time on ergos and yet the uh there's so much more you can do with just like yeah where where your hand yeah actually attaches to the gun hey uh give me give me one sec I'm just gonna I'm just gonna refill my glass sure yeah okay let's hop through those so the answer to that question is yes I think actually integrating the grip uh is better does it make support material a little more complicated yes but with the tree supports now available in most uh actually basically all slicers um it's not a problem uh it's a little more support material is really not at all a detraction so I think I think yeah I'm going to be doing it from now on moving forward I'm integrating all my grips uh just structure just strictly I mean structurally alone is enough but improve the ergos um is also an improvement uh let's see uh let's see uh miscellaneous uh things for now says I'll be 98 years old in three days that's actually the case that's pretty impressive uh especially if you're on Odyssey I that's uh that's up there so uh that's that's pretty awesome uh that you're here and uh you see he said I used pre-sage Cape Cod uh system and it was the very best I assume that's some sort of a uh CAD system I'm not quite sure um if you want to clarify a little bit that would be interesting now let's see uh Bigfoot goes boom has another design question here is how do I install the safety detent in Spring where the grip being implemented into the lower yes this is the other downside of using integrated grip I simply use kind of the brute force inelegant method I use a screw uh coming in from underneath a set screw with a hole and I simply push the d10 spring up from the bottom and put a set screw in to keep them in there I thought that was a good pragmatic solution I I really like how you implemented it it works but it does kind of have that ugly hold on there and it doesn't really get in the way of ergos but it's kind of a little bump you can feel it it's it's much better than how the um the the uh what would Stoner do integrate yeah yeah because I I I okay so I kind of don't necessarily agree that it's better so the problem with the way they did is they dropped it in from the top and then you like popped the safety in over it and it's a permanent installed yeah I really don't like that it [ __ ] me up yeah yeah so that is a terrible pain it's super elegant like if you're building it permanently like it's there's no exposed holes and that's kind of cool with the orc I actually can't do that because of the geometry I mean I could kind of like I could add a it would be hard to do it on the Orca I really I really I'm a big fan of pragmatic design Solutions do you wanna it's uh Exposed on that word a little bit exactly what's the name of that here a tiny [ __ ] hole isn't a big deal a not a non-removable part in a modular platform which is what the AR has become is a big deal yeah it's it's a big yeah that's why I I consider that for like five or ten minutes and I said oh I can't go with that I I do I think that it could be cool for certain plot guns maybe certain builds but it's for for especially for somebody 3D printed no it's a bad option no one is gonna no one will ever [ __ ] notice it you hand that gun to someone no one ever notices it that is true nobody notices you you take photos of it no one ever notices it like you know it when you build it or you know you're you literally I see that all the time yeah but like you can't let your own autism get in the way of like you know pragmatic design Solutions yeah well I think sometimes the best solution is the easiest and in this case this was the easiest kind of Brute Force set screw solution and it does work really well the threads are you can print the threads in to the part no problem just using 0.2 layer Heights and a standard 0.4 nozzle uh so I think it should be an integrated grip would be a benefit really I think on think anything that uses an AR-15 fire control group an integrated grip would help uh obviously like probably the biggest user of integrated grips uh kind of commercially is either is either it's probably HK HK loves their integrated grips they do uh yeah now they didn't do a very good job of it I don't think they kind of like um but they were like the biggest user of it and I I think it makes a lot of sense for plastic for plastic uh especially 3D printed Parts it makes them a lot stronger okay so another uh we have a couple more comments here and we'll I'll jump into kind of showing people kind of what I was doing with my lower and let me bring these up see okay so uh it was another question all right here uh pimp hand strong says have you seen plasticity yet I saw an ad the other day and it piqued my interest price is good no subscription plasticity it sounds to me like a mesh based thing no it's actually get get guess who they license the uh colonel from same same as sod working sottage yep it's actually a parasol based oh that's funny is it very similar I I mean I assume there's similarities if they're basing it on parasolid but around it all why do we need a third option based off the same I mean there's more than that too I mean if if someone wants to try to take what's good about parasolid and uh put it out for you know a no subscription free thing and try to make their money [ __ ] I don't know how but if someone wants to if someone wants to try to do that hey you know uh give it a shot is it yeah I mean plasticity I had never heard of it actually so it sounds um yeah I mean I mean hey they're they're on parasolid so they're it's obviously a relatively serious CAD program how bad could it be yeah exactly thanks explanation okay and uh 20 on Aussie let's see um let's see no touchy says wait are steps edible edit are steps editable yeah um and yeah a step file is just a file that has uh all of your surface geometry in it it's basically just a bunch of surfaces making a solid does that even have to be solid oh no I don't I don't think they do it's just a basic collection of surfaces in most cases they form a closed solid so steps are just like a nurbs interchange format um they don't have to be solid but they do have to contain like valid nurbs data yeah and uh they are editable there is no like feature or anything I never edit step files that sounds like something I don't know like little stuff on somebody else's design like little Ergo stuff or something like that I can understand using a step file but it just sounds like a kind of a dirty unpleasant thing to do I I like stop files a lot I use them quite a bit for um like I'm I'm using uh neutrons Neutron Nick just made a great design for um I mean it's just another block but he um you know hey you know I I listened to p80 Ralph he he lives you know I mean you you met him when you were down here yeah um I mean he lives like you know very close to me and uh yeah you know I wouldn't take his advice on Twitter but I'll take that man's advice on Glocks all day and uh yeah no seriously yeah but he has some pretty pretty nice yeah he's he he really knows the stuff so you know he says this Neutron Nick you know file is the best easiest to assemble workingest 3D Glock file he's ever seen and uh you know I talked to Nick and you know he's like yeah you know feel free to feel free to use it so you know I'm looking at potentially uh moving over to p80 rails for you know my next V3 iteration and uh yeah so I mean I can just grab that step file I can Orient it in you know my assembly and I don't have to I don't have to directly use it but I can grab any surfaces bodies edges just anything off it and that's by virtue of it being a step not like you know I couldn't do that with a mesh file no no no no no and that's mesh files are kind of like the very last mesh files is what you plug into like a post-processing program like a slicer like it's like the very very end of the production chain before you slice it yeah it's like if you're working in like Photoshop and like your final output is a JPEG but you know yeah you're not you're not saving that jpeg out a million times and like working on it no no exactly so that was the rest of our Odyssey files let's hop over to YouTube Odyssey comments so um we have a tempest adverse said what software is Chairman using I think we've been talking about this but you're basically using solid Edge yeah I mean I'm a solid Edge boy uh I'm a weird Boomer don't worry about it yeah it works like a normal person but an interesting thing to note though is solid Edge is available for free personal use it it is now completely free and there's no there's no like it's it's a fully featured version for completely free which is like a huge opportunity because SolidWorks does not provide that um and and and I mean solid Edge is fully featured it is as fully featured as SolidWorks I personally like the workflow better but that's you know that's important thing so if you are looking to start learning a more advanced CAD program definitely just checking out solid Edge I mean there's a direct link on on channel if your whole thing is I don't want to break the law which is kind of weird in this space but I mean I I don't break the law uh if if you don't want a pirate software and your option is free Fusion 360 or like student or you know whatever Community but you still pay for it SolidWorks so that is now available and that is I mean I think it's been available and that's super cool because that they have that uh so I I tried to get Siemens to like sponsor me a bit or like send something my way because like I made a post about it and it like did really like just out of for for a cad post it did really well so I was like you know let me uh let me search that and like the the most liked Post in all of Twitter history about solid Edge was like maybe like 30 likes so I was like hey guys I'm your most popular uh solid ended involver you want to like uh you wanna you wanna essentially your way they didn't get back no they never got back to me I wasn't German you know yeah who exactly what more do you expect so Logan here says I designed daily and SolidWorks using solid bodies what's the best way to start learning to design resurfaces so basically you need a reason to do it so if you're I don't know what you're designing but if you're designing something that is uh has a need for surfaces then just start using the surface tool like if you're using Lofts right now like you're using I used to use Lofts a lot which is basically when I first started I used Lofts a lot too yeah I I use like my pistol grip I don't think I've used The Loft in years surfaces are pretty much always superior to Lofts yeah yeah exactly so I'm not using Lofts anymore but I used to use lost a lot and that's a loft is just a closed surface that the program can turn into a solid yeah it's just it's it's it's it's it's just surface modeling with extra step it's just less reliable surface modeling yeah exactly and um if you're already using Lofts you can start substituting surfacing start just go in you probably don't even I don't know if you probably don't even have it out on your on your uh main SolidWorks dashboard but just go to your customize search for the boundary surface tool add it to your dashboard and then just start playing around with it and once you kind of understand how it works like we've been showing you here you'll definitely start to um you'll start seeing places you could use it and then to start implementing it and that's basically I mean that's the probably the best thing for you to do to start learning how to use it if you're a real cool guy who's using solid Edge now like uh Kyle over here in the YouTube comments you have a you have a whole dedicated surfacing tab it's awesome the way to so SolidWorks does that too with tabs I don't like the tabs I want I have all my tools like my primary tools they're all lined up right there no tabs like they're all on the top of my screen all the time you [ __ ] weirdo no they have tabs I've hidden them they have like the different like toolbars they call them like uh no they call them the command manager inside works like no thank you okay let's do other things we have here um let's see so I've been trying to get all my Mexicans to uh start using trackballs so I have this whole like department now and uh you know I'm I'm like the head of this department so I figure I can like you know basically just like Implement my technology like preferences on these people because like you know I I I'm really good at technology like these guys aren't so you know and I'm their boss now so maybe I should like you know if it's good for me maybe it'll be good for them so uh I'm I'm really trying to get people to start using trackballs because you know I I don't want people to get carpent on them exactly and how are they it's not working well it's not going well I don't yeah these people I mean I think oh my wire's not long enough I don't think I can there we go oh you're doing it yeah I've been using this for like a year now whenever this is the one I'm using I'm telling you though my thumb ball is still better I am giving this the long I do not have the angled thing yet okay I I I I will send you the file right now because it you have to have the angled thing and you have to have one of these oh oh there goes my battery I will change that in a second yeah so if you send me I will print it up and use that and um that'll be good uh okay so you should I just printed a new one to uh to take to my workstation in Mexico actually I'm refurbishing my oldest ball right now to uh clean it up and everything well just just to leave it down there because I've had this one for 10 years oh wow yeah so it's been around a long time oh yeah the L tracks I mean they're they're they're they're they're the 90s yeah they're they're old as dirt but uh yeah I've had this one for 10 years so I figured hey you know might as well just buy another one for at home and I can take this old one down and uh leave it at my Mexico workstation you know yeah okay so you can I I set you as I don't know if you have signed in as an administrator I sent you that link via an email I don't know if you saw that but I think you should be able to highlight comments from your end so you know what I I I accepted the administrator but I never whoops can you guys still hear me oh yes you can that was just I think just uh chairman stepped out okay guys I'm gonna be gone for just a second I'm gonna grab my new battery I was hoping that chairman could uh answer the comments while I was gone but let's just take a second he'll figure his end out [Music] okay let's see all right so um I'm back let's add uh chairman back to the stream so yeah it turns out logging into stream yard uh kicks you off of the stream but can I highlight comments now try give it a try uh uh no I that that's uh probably 100 on me I probably just [ __ ] it up yeah I I you have to like log in and then like make sure you log into your account it's a little weird um but whoa whoa we gotta explore some real out there stuff going on but I can uh I can highlight comments like this um what trackball do you recommend Rick Fair uh it's called the so this is very ghetto right now oh you you you you saw it off so it actually used to have the best name ever it used to be a company called clearly Superior Technologies and their product was called the clearly Superior trackball and so uh in in in most circles this trackball is known as the CST uh but a new they they got sold to like a holding company so I think the current um the current name on Amazon if you go and try to buy it is the L track yeah that's what they call it yeah I I've used every trackball out there and uh so this one I I feel though ergonomically you could use a lot of improvements like it's just this big flat dumb piece of plastic you have to tilt it and you have to have a wrist rest I did try it I did try yours and I do I do see how that helps like I'm super used to mine now but I'm going to try I'll try that I'll have to readjust to it but yeah it's it's it's the secret sauce is having it like that because it's like uh it's like a keyboard right like you have your wrist rest and like it's all about immobilizing your wrists and keeping your wrist comfortable yeah yeah uh if if you want to try another one the I don't personally like it but it's much more like ergonomic it's called the uh elcom big ball yeah I've already I've looked I looked at that one I don't like it oh yeah I already looked at it yeah no my problem is I I like I still think the thumb ball is better my thumbs have plenty of control just as much as my fingers and I my hand is more stationary like totally stationary the problem is the thumb balls I tried like some of the uh I mean there aren't there doesn't seem to be a good quality thumb ball available that's like they always get buggy yeah I mean you know I I I keep a bunch of these guys around that's it I've used those I love the ergonomics on it they just get buggy after a while and they just don't they don't respond smoothly well yeah I mean the the the problem is these zirconium uh elements so and actually I've I've replaced them on this one but they have um just these these tiny little ball bearings yep and usually usually they're quite [ __ ] but these ones actually I I modified this one with uh grease um steel ball bearings and the changing the ball bearings does make a small difference but uh I I still think that the the CST does it right the uh CST bearings okay there we go so the CST has bearings that are engineered like this so you have actual rollers you have actual ball bearings with an actual steel roller and the problem is they're still side slipped the ball is still side slipping because you have three of those guys you still have to have side slip when the ball rotates so it's not perfect I think it could be improved if you twist the ball but if you translate the ball there's no side slip no there there is there has to be uh on the on the one of them rolls the other two slip and roll now they're all polished so it's not a huge problem but um [ __ ] yeah you're right yeah I think going with I think suspending it on like cascading ball bearings would be better I don't know it's just I think it could be improved upon you know you know the best one would be like [ __ ] like magnets you know magnets magnets oh yeah I don't know how they work but I think it would be best okay so jumping back in here we are really falling behind here in the comments there's a few more I want to highlight so Simon Claret it comes in here the lack of Dimension scares me because just the tiniest nudge can completely change the model I could not agree more absolutely right here this is it this is right here need to turn blue lines black do they have that in they do yeah it's the same it's the same in uh solid Edge just SolidWorks yeah those when the line is fully everything I want fully defined across the board and then I can just take it and move stuff however I want I'll I'll do it without Dimensions to kind of get it where I want it and then Dimensions go in um okay let's see what else we have here okay I mean listen I I fully constrained my Mechanicals but the ergos like that's like free-flowing man that's like you know hey we can have fully fully defined free-flowing features how how are you gonna put a number on like what feels good in your hand man put the number there [Laughter] okay so Andy likes candy which I think the best handle we've had here today says Fusion 360 has good surfacing tools it's much more 3D printing orientated than the others so that's interesting what the [ __ ] does 3D printed oriented mean in a CAD program no so so I thought no no there could be tools a suite of tools dedicated to 3D printing to like analyze overhangs and stuff like that because what do you say solid Edge has that there's a whole 3D print there's a whole design for 3D printing analysis Suite that's built in that's so SolidWorks doesn't have that as far as I I must be on the it's on the more expense see I don't have I only have like the standard version I don't have professional you actually run a business doing that I actually run a business doing it yeah okay so I see guys okay well that's and I mean in that case it's it's fair across the board I I thought about upgrading but like I don't know I will look at other options first though why don't you grab the free solid Edge Edition I already have it yeah drag a model in and uh analyze it with the 3D printing analysis Suite I will do that and just just to check it out yeah I downloaded I just haven't played around with it because it can natively open your part files so you can just open up the file on solid Edge and just run the analysis when you're done with it yeah yep that would be uh that would be handy and like some other sketch tools uh like doing sketches that are like whole having like a predefined whole sketch that's defined that has the proper little teardrop shape that would be handy um just stuff like that um let's see where was that question okay so I think that's um let's see Richard writing all right let's see let's see um let me know if you see a good one I'm gonna try to scan through here so Ron bear the OG Microsoft trackball uh is actually really good it's it's one of like the OG finger balls uh it has a very high uh reputation among trackball enthusiasts but you know try finding one I mean I I've seen them go from multiple hundreds of dollars just uh get into the CIA if you if you want the best finger ball get into the CST slash L track uh put it on a 3D printed Riser get a wrist rest I mean that's that's the cheapest best trackball and they actually support their customers you know you you you can own a 10 year old trackball and your bearings are shot uh they'll they'll send you all and you know you can they'll they'll send you replacement parts for the whole thing like I I have this one sitting on my workbench my 10 year old one bearings are fun but I uh I got a little too aggressive for with the scroll wheels so I uh I broke I broke one of the plastic mounting points for the scroll wheel and I'm I'm just waiting on a new plastic housing from uh CS you know from uh L track instead of having to buy like a new you know 160 dollar trackball you know some guys in Missouri are just sending me the park and you know cost me less than 20 bucks so um Simon cleric is back with another great comment AutoCAD is depreciated trash uh it actually still is the best 2D rafting software like if you're doing okay I I'll admit there are legitimate reasons why you might want to do that but um and and as I said for furniture layouts you know doing like a layout like doing like layouts building layouts that kind of thing yeah yeah like doing like like construction Factory like 2D blueprints like there's still a lot of 2D cat out there for you know like floor plans is a big one um you you do see quite a lot of it and it's used quite a bit and yeah I I can see I can see why you'd want to do that I mean obviously not in what we're working with but there are places where um doing layouts is very very handy if Euro 2D drafting like professional AutoCAD I in my opinion is still really the best piece of software out there um it's it's just real it's for for what it try like the 3D stuff they've tacked on AutoCAD is is garbage hot garbage the actual like core 2D AutoCAD experience is you know once you learn it it's the best 2D drafting software out there foreign and then one last thing from Simon again he says you can tell SolidWorks to automatically assign stuff um that's true you probably don't want to do that it defines everything off of like a central reference plan and does it in a very uh Cartesian uh coordinates orientated way it's just not not pretty you want to Define stuff in the way you want however that is okay so I think that that gets back to most of the highlighted I probably missed some I'm in here but I think I highlighted the big ones um uh we have one here from uh namhi Nami I wish more people were working on 37 millimeter designs love my nt79 and can't wait for the RPG 37 yeah I think they're awesome the problem is um without reliable explosive and uh fuse uh trains they lack practicality and there's a lot of legality issues with that so that's kind of the problem with them it's just the chemical side of it is very challenging okay I just I just want to make one more point about the Excellence of the CST this is the csts bald it's the largest largest mass in the entire thing well it's not just that you know what this is do you know what this is that is a blue no it's not blue it's actually not blue it's just it's like a translucent darkish color this is this is just the old black one okay oh you know what this actually is it looks kind of like an eight ball it's it's exactly a billiard ball these are just these are just billiard balls without Legends nice so you can take any billiard ball put it and have CST and it works so what when I worked in Baltimore and was using the CST like when it was like Raven season I'd throw like a novelty Ravens ball in there okay Oriole season I throw a novelty Orioles ball in there uh people liked it you know it was it was a good time so you can throw like if you can find a novelty pool ball Billiards ball you can throw it in your you can throw it in your CST and it's a one-to-one replacement and uh it's a good time that is that is funny yeah I've noticed that that it is it is that size it's not it's not just that size when they were prototyping it that's what they used they took the pragmatic approach and said and it is a nice solid it's not like one of those little Hollow aluminum balls or something it's a nice solid heavy I mean it does feel really nice I just wish it was a thumb ball I wish they took this and convert it to a thumb I feel like I could re-3d print a housing almost you could but I don't here's what I don't like I like the ball on it I do not like the switches and the scroll wheel I don't like the way like my hand has to like hover all the time I mean you get used to it but I don't like I want my hand to be relaxed how how do you touch it I'm curious about that because I've heard this complaint before but I think people are sounds like that's like a very personal question no no so I I'm up here same thing same and coming down and so like my my middle finger okay so your middle finger up there and then yeah I'm like right on top of it and then I move up and down yeah same thing okay I just it just and I'm used to that now I I you know I don't think about it but the problem is especially when I was starting like on a my palm is not super well supported like the base of my my hand is supporter but like the center of my hand is kind of like kind of kind of it's all kind of like floating there yeah well that's that's that that's the angle the rise of that yeah a ton okay I I don't even use these anymore without the uh angled riser okay yeah yeah I will have to uh I will print that out I will get that printed out tomorrow um okay so I'm going to do a screen share again that's I know it's getting we've just I know we just burned a lot of time they're talking but that's okay all right I'm sure that we're having fun and I hope the viewers are uh following along I I I my my wife is asleep on the couch uh she fell asleep watching uh that new Idol anime which is actually excellent but uh I know you don't watch anime but I I got all the time in the world my wife's asleep excellent okay so um I was going to go over just kind of some of the steps I did using surfacing on uh the rest of this pistol grip and then I was gonna go over the kind of the whole lower and it's kind of my thought process so I've I've just been trying I started off with this just trying a whole bunch of different stuff like until I work out I'm trying to work out my workflow like the order in which I want to do things in order to use as few features as possible or as few uh basically as few basically yeah a few as few features as possible I want to do things with as few steps as possible like as smoothly as possible so I keep like redoing it trying to optimize that make it as robust so I want to try to make my models as robust as possible so I can go back and change stuff and tweak it without having it fall apart so that's kind of another big thing I like to focus on but I I I I I really appreciate that um and and I reach similar Ends by using like the booleans the way I do but like yeah you know I I I don't think you you would never abandon that for like the sake of a cool feature I I often like put features on top of stuff where I'm just like man I just want to add that no so I'll do that just to try it but then I will go back and do it right later I I never go back and do it the correct way never I can't handle that the the lines of my soul the the bones like the bones of my models are always you know completely correct but uh when it comes to like you know the refinement and like oh I'm gonna add a feature add a feature here add a feature there yeah I just I I I just wing it on top of it attack them on so right now what I'm doing with this lower is I'm just designing the body of the lower so if there's no pinholes or anything I'm just designing the body so that just the I mean it's just it's just that it's just the outside kind of the the major features that make up the lower structurally and that after I do this I'll then cut all of the other features and that's where I could actually use Boolean operations perfectly except just to kind of drop in an already pre-designed piece possibly but um I'll do that afterwards and once I'm at that stage if I want to add a small feature I'll just tack it on top no problem but when I'm in like the earlier design stage I'm trying to get everything else worked out I want it to all be super stable and uh consistent and not I mean we're we're we're completely agreed on that uh good we're doing we're doing it in different ways I I like to start with a solid and like useful that's what I used to do I I used to start but I'm now kind of moving more towards just kind of ground up doing the part um yeah yeah I I I I I see why you're going towards that it's the it's the right thing to do exactly it's the right ladies and gentlemen or boys and girls it's the right thing to do um Okay so this particular this particular uh I have that I have that half of the pistol grip right there and this is and this is this is a really great example of why surfaces are so good for this particular type of thing so I used to blend my pistol grips into my lowers and in fact let me actually bring up an example real quick just using like fillets and [ __ ] yeah let me show you guys um it actually worked pretty good I mean I'll bring it up it's not the same no no it's not I actually am not totally positive that these ergonomics I'm gonna be happy with them because there's nowhere to like put my thumb we will see um gotta have a place to put your thumb yeah I'm adding a little a little bulge there it's going to kind of rest I think it's gonna be I think we're gonna be good but like we will see we will see I have not printed this guy out yet I'm still working on them let me open up my um lower version 5.3 right there so let's drag this this is the I'm gonna bring the Orca in here so the Orca was done with a mix of surfacing and solid modeling um and oh I messed that up do not want to do it that way that was almost a big mistake let's go let me get the file I have been I have been chipping away at your Orca I uh I took all the internals and I like turned them into a solid that I could just subtract so I can commit heresy with it yeah I I saw you mentioned you were working on that I so yeah I mean there it definitely needs the pistol grip area needs some work and uh there's there's a lot you could do with it actually I also I'm I'm not going to do a lot I'm just only gonna do dumb [ __ ] you can't stop me because you've already sent the files yeah so I do did you see I I did release the native SolidWorks I thought I saw that I saw that yeah so those are also available okay I'm I just had to reshare a different screen boom okay so the like the AR had never interest me before the Orca because like it's boring what what can you do with it but now yeah there's a lot it's a super modular system which may seem like boring and plain but it really opens up a lot of options I'm gonna take this guy all the way back now this is a model I'm pretty proud of it this one came out really nice it's just look at all those nice neat oh you can't see these neat folders there we go look at all those nice neat all my planes the inside everything's in its own little category so this will come out very nicely okay so our pistol grip is right there so yeah there's a whole lot of stuff in that folder but the um let me back up to back all the way up to that Loft there we go so my original grip was just a loft so we talked about Lofts earlier um but why is it going black when I do that that's weird that's weird actually because it doesn't go black on my main screen only on stream yard so this is a loft and it's it's the same it does the same thing as the surfaces do it just creates a solid body so that's the Loft right there and then I used a second Loft and I just dropped a second Loft right in here like this and then I used a fillet to uh let's see I fill it at the front end of it then I use fillets just to kind of blend it in like that and it it works but it's not totally optimal I don't have very much control over like what happens down here it's just all kind of like just shoved together with with fillets so let's make that small and let's um swap back over to our other screen let's just go present and I will show you how I'm doing it now share screen let's go there share I'll make that big let's go there we go okay so this is a perfect example of why um of why surfacing is so handy so I want to attach this this grip which is just half the grip in this case up to this uh this lower receiver and I've I've made this feature right here I basically kind of Blended and cut out my upper my uh my lower receiver to create this opening which is all tangent edges so that these tangent edges here kind of match up to well let's imagine half of it that the one half here while it's curved and complex it matches up to this half here it's all nice and curved there's no weird geometry that's not going to match up that's one thing when doing surfaces like this is everything does need to match up uh to create a smooth surface and in this case I'm not quite there yet there's still some little weirdness in here but it's almost perfectly smooth I'm gonna show you what this looks like let's go there let's go show that the screen is going black a couple times so I don't know why it's doing that it's a little bit weird but what I thought basically down here is I have um we've made those visible let's go up here and boom so what I've done here is I have selected just like we did for the grip body I've selected except instead of using sketches I'm using the grip body itself I've selected the top edge of that grip not body but surface so I've stuck to the top edge of the grip surface right there I've selected right there I've selected the Hat one half of this Edge right here and then I have selected the um back strap area right there for a guide curve and then down here I have selected the area right here right above your finger as a guide curve and I've drawn these these curves or sketches which I've drawn in which are tangent to uh the the rest of the the lower receiver and that is basically all I've done and then I set the surface right here curvature to face so basically it takes that surface and it matches the curvature of the surface with this face right here the highlighted face and um if I disabled curvature to surface I made that none you'll see it just kind of drops in there at uh just uh it just kind of wherever the surface naturally comes in it is where it rests so the set surface is not tangent to the face at all but if I go back to tangency to face boom now it drops it in and it just that's tangency to face and then I want to go curvature to face which is just a little bit different it just Blends in a little bit more smoothly basically nope nope not Direction back there I just mess it up there we go and that's basically all I'm doing so this is an operation which should be very difficult to do not without using surfacing so this is a great example impossible to do without doing surfacing basically yeah I mean you could you saw how I did it I did it on the uh on the Orca I just kind of like mashed together with fillets and you can guess something that works but you can't get something this well Blended without using surface well also also you just don't have the control like yeah you you don't like surfacing lets you precisely go from like transition to transition yes smoothly and like in a this is a complex curve so so you mentioned before that you never use any tools for highlighting uh curvature no you just like look at it so so I I use the curvature you know so I I work at a smaller scale than you as well so I can also just like print it quite a lot easier like that's true but at this stage in the operation I don't have anything to print it's just like some surfaces that's true but yeah I well I I always have something to print because I I always Bond stuff to solids you cut yeah you're cutting cut yeah yeah you always have a solid I mean I completely agree this will be printed I have uh previous guys I print these out look at them I mean there's no better tool than actually printing out and feeling it with your fingers to see what it's like um but like you can but you can see here this this particular tool in SolidWorks it just highlights the color is connected to the curb the radius of of that particular curve so red is obviously Tighter and black is is zero is is uh actually I I want to address a comment can you uh can you highlight plastic blasters comment the most recent comment on YouTube this makes me glad I use f360 I'm already lost watching this glad my dude my dude you're talking to the most popular designer of the most popular rightful platform for 3D printing in the world Hoffman Tactical and that same guy for the most popular handgun platform you should be upset that you are not understanding this because if you want to make good designs this is the stuff you need to understand so take a deep breath and then download solid Edge it's free Start experiment I know this may have been facetious I'm not sure I you know I I I I don't care it's not it's not about yeah yeah you're goddamn right okay yeah absolutely check out uh check out solid Edge if we're going to keep going for a minute I'm gonna refresh my drink one more time because do that yeah we're gonna go I Was Gonna Knock up a ten we'll go a little bit longer just because this is as normal taking longer but I wanted to kind of go over there I'm I'm here till you're not here I just want to make sure that I'm I'm drunk so I can abuse chat awesome okay everyone everyone heard that right good okay all right so um so that's kind of a really really good example like if you're wondering what surfacing is good for this intersection of the pistol grip up to the uh lower receiver is a really great example I can I can very properly blend this in and what I was highlighting earlier with this tool was you can see we've got some little surface anomalies because it's trying to take this complex curve up here and blend it into this curve down here and it's trying to stretch it to make it do that and that is not always done perfectly so I need to kind of play with my guide curves a little bit this is almost perfect like there's it's this is probably totally acceptable as it is I mean you're not going to ever feel any any problems there um but I I am going to take another look at this just if I can smooth this out a little bit more try to figure out what's going on there but this is a great example of why um surfacing is so great for this kind of thing and then I just take this surface right here and I just use a mirror tool flip it around there I now have a complete pistol grip that is hopefully ergonomically proper I'm gonna take a lot of stuff from my previous design so this should have a nice radiused finger groove up in here um no no pressure points nice uh area to rest your thumb right in here right along there a nice spot that holds your thumb so this this uh is really looking promising I'm really I'm happy with how this is how this is going along so that's a really good example of surfacing right there another example of where I'm using surfacing and this is something that actually took me weeks to figure out and just working on it um I was just wasn't sure what I wanted and I'm still not super happy with it but it's this new support rip um and this is uh surface as we'll look at in a second but I'll go in and we have a comment in here um let's see right here um North or n Kerry says what degree angle am I using for my pistol grip that is a good it's just a good general purpose question I have experimented quite a bit with angles on pistol grips in the past and um this guy here is like an 18 18 to 23 degree angle I want to say let me just bring it up it's it's pretty much correct I mean these these days you want to keep it on rifle platforms these days you want to go more towards the vertical and honestly even on handguns um yeah yeah totally so so two vertical it's a balance I don't know so so I I always thought like vertical just feeling it with my the way my wrist motion Works let's bring us up real quick I want to think like vertical is better because like I want to just kind of hold my wrist like vertically but when you actually try it it's just not natural like a little bit back is is good so I felt I I'm using AR versus you know handgun is a little different in this regard especially with gold it is uh Glock magazines force a a pretty steep angle actually steeper than you would really like to have so sorry you can't see the base plate but I mean yeah it's steep so one of the things you do to make blocks and you know it's just a factor of um you know when the gun was designed yeah um but they've never changed that so uh that's one of people's Chief complaints like that's one of the things that pushes people towards platforms like the Sig P320 yeah um what is kind of like the general angle on your grips you're gonna be mad at me you don't know I don't know I thought that I thought that would be the answer so for those of us to use numbers my grip is between 18 and 23 degrees there's actually a five degree difference between the front end and the back end um I have it actually tapered it gets a little bit wider as it goes down so yeah I just I I just go entirely by look and feel when it comes to the ergos I I do not put numbers on any of them you guys have now seen it chairman is officially an artist I went dude I went to Art School like I don't know it's no excuse it's actually it's actually like dude you know what I you know what I originally went to school for did I tell you when you were here in San Antonio I don't think you did glass blowing glassblowing I originally went to college for glass blowing I was I was a prodigy glassblower as a high schooler glass blowing is a fascinating subject not successfully not like not like blowing like the tiny stuff like you know little like pipes and like you know [ __ ] like that where it's like you know that's that's like tabletop work like actual like Venetian glass blowing with like you know the iron rods you know as long as you are I don't know why you didn't mention that that's like big news that's really cool that was a long time ago oh wow you know you know I had to get out of it why I couldn't stand the Heat there was a different there's a big difference between doing it a couple hours a day you know after school and doing it you know eight to twelve hours a day all [ __ ] day I literally couldn't handle the heat I understand that uh doing a little bit of Foundry work myself in the past I do understand that in both the uh physical and metaphysical sense but yeah see this guy just nailed it Andy likes uh candy chairman Walton would love it because it's all free for mesh yeah that that explains a lot about my Approach you know yeah that is uh that is interesting yeah I don't know I like things fully defined hey no I listened my I'm a pragmatist whatever results in a great design you know and it's it's your it's your process that you own you know exactly yeah I mean if it works that's what matters I mean Hey listen when it comes to my day job the [ __ ] chairs like you ask me you know any of the key dimensions of any chairs that I do you know [ __ ] rattle them off like you know the length with you know material efficiency of a part you know I [ __ ] I'm in manufacturing like I I I deal with all this stuff you know that's like my day job when I design guns it's like oh you know I want to uh I wanna I wanna let loose and do cool edgy CAD not the uh boring stuffy so I mean like you know my cat is both stuffy and boring no it's not though but like you know it's like so I I I have a really long desk right here and over here is my workstation he literally has two two different desks and he transitions from personally no it's one desk it's one desk okay two different desks in one and you can slide back and forth It's the strangest thing if you guys have ever seen it I don't know it's just weird so I'm at work and I'm doing boring stuffy CAD five o'clock rolls around I slide over here crack a beer and start doing cool educat appeals to me I like I don't know I do like that idea I'll unbutton my shirt start doing the cool cad [Laughter] yes okay so um and I do have one one question we'll catch before we leave I'll ask you about your shirt I do have a shirt question for you but um this is another example of surfacing so this support rib this is the new support rib which is the most perfect support rib I've been able to come up with the date and I'm actually not happy with a part of it but what I wanted in a support room my previous support rib on my all my older lowers I've released was simply a lofted surface I mean not a lot it was a lofted body it was just a loft that was defined by a bunch of Curves and it was just kind of a if you've ever looked at one it's just kind of a sweep it's not very efficient it in order to prevent it from interfering with the so so the problem is if we look along right here this profile there's there's a profile right here that profile is designed to fit Opera receivers that's the purpose of it upper receivers are straight and parallel along that surface for the most part there are some features but in general we want this surface I mean I'm not matching it it just it just can't interfere with 90. I want this surface optimally for for what I'm doing I want this surface to extrude directly perpendicular to the buffer to the buffer Tower I want this to be flat straight out from the bumper Tower yeah okay got it yeah exactly you know the plane that is would be right here obviously that's that's open right now um that's what I would want so I finally achieved that with this support rib and um I also the older one had like not a properly defined radius on the top of the rib so this one here I have a nice properly defined radius and then what I'm not happy with is just because the very nature of what I'm trying to do I end up kind of with this little bit of a Bend right at the end here that's just geometrically it has to be that way the way the parts fit together um and it kind of gives you this Roman nose look up front which is like I don't know I'm not a giant fan of that but Roman knows it's a it's a sheep term I don't know ah okay I thought I thought you were into uh what's what's those pseudoscience of like head shapes like for phrenology oh no that's that's separate that's separate um yeah we can talk about that next string um but yeah it just it just kind of has that little lump there I'm not super happy with but just to back this up and show people kind of why I I you really have to have surfacing to do this uh properly and uh yeah yeah it all started with a plane that is this is the important surface this is the number one thing I have to Define this is a extruded straight uh it's a surface extrude so it's a surface that's just an extrusion it's just a perfectly straight uh surface coming off of one line one sketch and this is the inside and it's it's totally straight as you can see and um it this is the part that is going to be on the inside of the support rib it's going to mate with the upper receiver that is a uh critical critical part so that's why I draw that that's the very first thing and then I um no I I use split lines and delete face like a lot that's like my primary tool right now so I've used the uh I draw a sketch right here on the center plane I then project that onto uh the part onto the surface to split it like that and then I use the delete face to delete it so that's kind of my current toolbox that's like that's like the number one thing I use for TR I just trim surfaces back to get them where I want no I mean I I use that type of stuff a lot I mean in a slightly different way because you know I generally am like working just with the uh solids but I definitely I mean curves is something that you know that that was a revelation for me in the past few years you know working more with curves curves like uh splines or well like um sketches projected onto surfaces oh yeah yeah yeah you mean yeah so no okay so so as far as that goes I see what you're saying now curves I try to avoid them where possible because they tend to be unpleasant to work with in SolidWorks like you can't relate everything to them so what I like to do instead is I just use the split line to split this face yeah you're you're you're using a curved surface to split another surface and then deleting half of it yeah or even if I don't delete it I now have this this uh Edge right here to work with and this Edge is very robust and easy to work with so that video if I wanted to get like and that's basically equivalent to a three-dimensional sketch now so you can obviously that that that that that this is what this is what we meant earlier about 3D sketches being stupid like you should the pot you should Define them using other features yeah yeah so they're possible yeah it's always possible well I could give you I'll show you where I use a 3D sketches show me one good use of a 3D sketch I'll eat my [ __ ] Sheba okay I'll show you where I used one and we'll judge whether or not whether or not it was useful and no we will not be allowing any any eating of of the world's cutest cartoon dog okay so so I in this particular case I deleted that because I don't I don't care about it so I now have that's the inside of my support rep that's what I want I've cut it to where I want it everything's nice everything's perfect and then I um add a rule I use so like this is a weird little thing I did here I basically added a ruled surface yeah it's basically it's it's basically a swept surface yeah but but it like but it has the great feature that I can make it perpendicular to the surface it's ruled off of yeah yeah in solid Edge swap surfaces or by default perpendicular to the surface they're coming off of ah okay so this is kind of the equivalent of that then yeah yeah um I think I could give you this was this is just the easiest simplest way to do this inside works and then I use another split to split that and then I delete it yeah just to trim it up yeah and that's to make it so it's tapered now because I wanted it to take when you man we use surfacing in wildly different ways so like have you ever have you ever seen someone who's really good at Rhino do like a rhino workflow I haven't I haven't looked into Rhino hardly at all I looked into a little bit enough you're you're oh [ __ ] uh your workflow here is like Rhino workflow [ __ ] 101 like this is how people make like I feel like that's a bad thing like I'm not it's not a bad thing or a good thing I'm just saying like this is really reminiscent of basically how people construct like complicated uh shapes in rhino is basically making like a whole mess of surfaces stitching them and then you know making them watertight um this is not like my normal workflow like I mean the Orchid would be like I don't really have a normal Warfare like it's constantly changing so this is what I've settled on in the last week I just started it's like two days ago so this is I I hesitate to recommend Rhino to anyone but if you're getting really into like this type of work well you know you're not going to get the same like parametrics but like well that's the thing I I've looked at it right on a little bit and from what I can tell like I have not been impressed so like how could you do this and then how could you do surfacing without parametrics uh no you mean you have parametrics it's just not like you know it's not as organized I see I see but like this this is like how Rhino Wizards work like you're you're basically like you're basically doing the yeah yeah so you're basically doing like you're basically doing the Rhino workflow which is which is very interesting to see I've I've actually never seen someone like do a workflow like this in um like solid modeling like that's weird okay my my well it's not weird my work like the workflow that I'm doing with like V3 where it's you know you start with a solid and refine it is much more typical of like high level solid modeling work this is like I'm not I'm not saying what you're doing is bad I'm just saying that's interesting use that makes I mean I understand that but like refining a solid model is something that I nowadays I would probably use that for more of a mock-up like that's what I did for the initial design on this I was just cutting away from like I I did a basic solid model for like the main body here and then like the grip and I kind of cut away at it to get an idea of what I wanted to do but once I did a few iterations of that I had a solidity of what I wanted to do and then I'm now using just surfaces to really make a robust model where everything integrates super nicely that's kind of the idea I have here as I said this is actually the first time I've done this so we will see how it turns out I I I think that once you get to this being feature complete you're not gonna like this workflow anymore feature complete as in like having all of the features complete on it like I think I think you want I think once you take this to the end stage yeah so okay so so my my full attention here the way this is you're gonna you're gonna convert it to a solid at a certain point and then build on top of it I know you're not going to do the entire thing and surfacing I think once you've taken it to that entire place though I mean if if I'm wrong I'll give this a try for my next frame like if if you take this all the way and still think how you're doing it right now is like how to do it I'll I'll give it a shot for my next frame but I think once you try to go back and like fix mistakes you've made once you've built features on top of this because everyone makes mistakes yeah yeah you have you no you can't see it yet I can't see it yet I know they'll be there you have them you have a mistake already somewhere in this family in here somewhere um yeah so I see what you're saying it's gonna be hard to go back and fix it but the way I normally do things it probably wouldn't be any easier to fix you see what I mean so the way you're doing it would make it easy so your method will be easier to fix I think yeah my method's super plastic like I lose a lot of like I lose a lot of clarity which would drive you crazy like once I get deep in the market yeah that your feature tree does drive me crazy but my foundational feature tree is as good as yours like I I build on a strong Foundation and then I like revise out from there but like my foundational features my grip angle my back strap my front strap my like bass thumb support and all of the mechanical stuff is defined extremely early in the feature tree and either locked down or other features are added on top of it in a way to keep those features editable I mean and that and that Foundation is what is what's so critical and having all your basic uh everything all your basic stuff nailed down that's that's what that's what's important if if you have something uh fundamentally wrong the model is going to be very hard to work with but once you have that on your your off to a much better start I mean man you're just you're you're kind of in the great unknown for this as far as I'm concerned like you're doing uh you're doing solid modeling like it's rhino huh that's that's I that's I'm not I guess I need to look into write on some more that's interesting yeah I mean this is this this is Rhonda like if if if you stripped out like the uh if you just screenshotted your like viewport without all the tools yeah I'd say like and you said like hey what CAD program is this I just immediately say right ha that's funny um I I wouldn't have I don't I will look I did not realize Rhino I always thought a rhino was being a little more meshy type based no Rana was fully developed so Rhino I I always call it the Swiss Army CAD because you can do literally anything in Rhino it's just never the best tool for the job I don't know that doesn't sound very good but um rhino has a place I I I keep Rhino on all of my computers I just I see what people do with Rhino and that's kind of what makes me so skeptical of it like I see people doing very organic non-precision things models and stuff like I see them doing very artistic uh animated object type models and stuff like that that's just what I've seen like I haven't really looked into it in detail though to know everything yeah you got you you got to spend some time with some real [ __ ] Rhino Wizards because like Rhino has this uh really popular add-on called like grasshopper that makes like organic like you know stuff like vases and [ __ ] super yeah and so you see a lot of like low-skill Rhino stuff just like using grasshopper to [ __ ] you know churn out you know vase number 53 and you know yeah yeah number 15. not not anything really uh not really anything that's that could be uh not anything it's designed for the ground up but I mean the the there there are like high level Rhino Wizards out there there are people who can really make Rhino saying uh for solid modeling like I but I mean this this is going to be a once this shell is complete solid yeah and I'm going to be doing a lot of solid modeling on top of it there's lots and lots of features it's it's the workflow that I'm actually just skeptical of I I hope this works for like I hope this works and I'll I'll be really interested to see it once you have it working but my impression is that you're basically fighting the software so right now not I mean this designing this now that I kind of understand what I how I wanted to use my features this has been very pleasant to put together like I haven't had any issues it really has been very smooth however I didn't when I first started this a week ago I didn't know how I wanted to do any of the features down here for an example by the grip like obviously I'm adding this uh you know this curve inside of here and uh this piece right here the way this is modeled I didn't I had this as like an extrusion sideways and such so once I figured how I wanted to do it ever all the pieces have kind of Fallen together and this has actually been very easy to do like being surfaces over a solid doesn't really hasn't really made a huge difference because if this was a solid like it was on a previous model this both the uh magazine well right here and the main body as I call it right here those are both solids but as I added features like the area like this this feature right here this uh this surface I ended up just cutting those solids apart into uh surface as I I'd remove those faces and then add add the curved surface that I wanted so it's not really any different no I'm gonna don't get me wrong I I see your logic here the model looks really good I'll just be curious how it ends up in a month yeah how this actually com how this merges with like the stuff that you need to do in solids and what well we're gonna find out we will see yeah I'm I'm I'm super I'm I'm I I'm gonna keep asking you about this because I'm I'm super curious how this actually like plays out in the end yeah we will we will see I don't know right so far it's not because there's anything wrong with this workflow like like I said like I I've seen people do workflows like this who are some of the best CAD people I know but I've never seen someone do a workflow like this in solid Edge or SolidWorks like I've seen this is a workflow that I I see most closely associated with Rhino and like the the really the really good Rhino people that I've met who've worked like this basically take something like this and then convert it over to um you know solid solid works normally to like you know make it production ready um I've never seen and maybe this is just like maybe it'll work really well and like you might just be I think you I it's much easier to do this type of workflow in rhino so I think that's so one right I would make this easier though I mean because I'm just I'm it's it's it's it's it's built around this type of workflow that's okay I will have to look at it right on that case maybe you shouldn't you should you should you shouldn't because you're you're I'm curious now I'm curious like how how their workflow would be more optimized I I yeah I'm doing parametric surfaces uh there's but dude there's a difference between like doing parametric surfaces like I consider myself as a guy who like does parametric surfaces like well you do I mean I I don't mention them well but it's not it's not about the dimensioning them it's like how I'm using them I'm I'm using them in the context of a solid modeler like I'm using parametric surfaces to modify solid solid yes yes so rather than what I'm doing and so I've done that in the past and I still do that in some parts I just it makes it seems cleaner to me simply to build the solid from surfaces rather than just cut it and modify it at an early stage later on when I want to add a particular feature but you're you're putting refined features into this point like you're you're you're rounding stuff over that just like should be like fillets like so so to you well I mean some stuff here is actually like this that's a fillet that's a fillet right there yeah but why would you put that into this stage where because it becomes uneditable because you want it to merge into that this fillet merges into all of this but you can always do a very so you can all I know so I have used variable fillets no no but but I don't I'm so one of my so avoiding the use of Phillips is actually like a big thing I'm trying to do here I don't know I hate Phillips are my number one enemy I I hate them too variable are the worst and I'm going to have to use some there is going to be like this this is going to be a fill at a later stage here all of this underneath the support room is going to be all one big variable fill it um because that's the best way I mean it'll be silly for me to try to surface model that curve like I needed work okay this is this this is just for chat uh this isn't an argument like we're not we're we're we're not arguing about like how people like two grand Masters don't argue about how to play chess we're just discussing we're just discussing the different uh the different options the different options here like at the end of the day no matter how Hoffman does this he's gonna end up with like an st or ar model uh I'm I'm I'm confused because I haven't seen this before I haven't seen someone do something like this in a solid modeling program to this extent and I'm just this is totally experimental I when I started this I was like I basically asked myself the question why am I making this a solid if I'm just gonna cut it open later and Patch it back together I said why am I even doing that it makes it just seems cleaner to start resurfaces and then at the end of the day patch it together and uh and then turn it into a solid and boom there's my complete body and uh I can start adding my refined small features like I know to you you you probably are thinking that some of these curves are refined but to me like this this fill it right here this this is a gross feature that was the that that was the meanest thing you've ever said to me you son of a [ __ ] which word of the words was it uh to you I see okay no no here like I see okay um my my concern here is that once you take this model out of like the conceptual stage or like the the the the early foundational stages okay so what you're not what you're not seeing here is you're not seeing my like six other models I've already done of this in the conceptual stages that's so that's the I don't go through my workflow is not in one I'll I'll do one lower until I get to a certain point just to understand how I want to do it and then I'll start again and I'll start again in a different order of operations and that's what this is so I've actually started from scratch on this guy just basically moving sketches taking sketches over from the other models where I needed to save time let me be very clear I don't think at the end of the day you won't be successful doing this like I think you're gonna make a model My my what I think is gonna happen though is you're gonna get to the end of this and say I wish I solid it or I I think you're just gonna be like yeah that works but I'm not doing that again we're gonna see who we will see okay I don't know I just I idea of mixing solids and surfaces in the same model just doesn't appeal to me on a base level like I did it but if I can do it all surfaces without wasting a ton of time which I haven't it's it's actually gone together really quickly you you you you're like I mean I'm I'm the same way but like you you you have an idea and you get fixed your your face it bothers me I don't know I want it to be neat like symmetrical all I see just not a mess I don't want like a tangle of stuff here and we have 3D arms in the house he says next let's do boxing streams oh Tim would beat me man he'd kick my ass I don't know I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm old and I drink too much this guy is uh [ __ ] young and only drinks the finest uh milk and cream he'd beat my ass exactly the latter part is true the the Milky cream part absolutely the finest um okay so next time I drive home to DC I'm stopping at your farm and I'm uh I'm I'm drinking some [ __ ] milk you need to seriously yes yes uh anytime just let me know when I used to volunteer for the farm to Consumer Legal defense fund which was a law group that specialized in defending farmers who were like selling raw milk to people because it was against the law I used to very much you know I'm a raw milk you know that book uh it gets shared as a the cover gets shared as a meme everything I want to do is illegal uh yes that's that's Joel Saladin he's a uh he's a farmer in southern Pennsylvania oh yeah I know that Joel Sultan is yeah yeah I I'm a family friend oh really yeah no we we've been to his farm a bunch of times I [ __ ] banged one of my girlfriends in his uh Barn once that is uh pretty funny stuff that's funny you know yeah yeah yeah he's been uh basically the guy for a long time yeah well yeah I mean the farm to Consumer Legal defense fund the Sally Fallon Foundation like you know I'm I'm I I'm big on Raw good milk you know that's excellent yeah I I guess I mean you did mention we talked about this a little bit so this is uh always a good thing yes as Simon Says Yes based Milkman absolutely based off man he's the he's the Milkman these days I I I live in the big city I can't get good milk to uh save my life but uh it's true it's true and that's the uh as we discussed major disadvantage of Metro urban areas yeah it's I mean that's the problem with City living yes um yeah so back to the model um the the uh basically I just did the support ribbon stages using surfacing so we have the inside and then I did the top Edge right here and the top Edge I did something weird I just kind of I wanted this to like twist in a certain way so I just I did that um I did that ruled surface I talked about earlier and then we tapered it as I wanted like that to kind of get the taper and then I I added I added uh this secondary boundary surface right here and this is just another because this is adding I'm taking this is adding an offset and a little bit of a Twist so basically I'm I'm trying to Define and then I added a curve on top of it and then I just deleted that geometry underneath that was just oh okay I get it yeah it's just yeah yeah let's just reference but that basically I can now tweak how this top twists and how it sits on top of my primary inside surface and now I have this nice radiused uh surface on top it's nice uh properly defined tapered it gets narrower at the top and then gets wide at the bottom to properly interface down here with the rest well I large I have not drawn yet here here's my [ __ ] problem with you Tim here's my problem with what you're doing and here's why I think it's [ __ ] okay you're you're focusing on you know the surface solid dichotomy and not on the more pragmatic like bigger feature to smaller feature so all right I'm so my word you have small features in here you have small radiuses no so so that's cool you're seeing them as features I'm when I look at this design I'm looking at these basically as like a and as almost as like an assembly so when I look at this I see uh six different components here basically there is the magazine well right here that's one component I then have the lower body it's this guy right here I then have the grip bodies this guy right here then I have the support rib which I'm designing right now well before that I have the buffer Tower then I have the support rib and then I have the right side reinforcement which is the reinforcement over here and that kind of idea of putting together those six different features came from my earlier designs and that's just kind of how I thought about lower receivers ever since so that's kind of how I think about lowers and that's how I'm designing this I'm designing this in a pretty orderly way I designed this guy and I design the main body they design the grip then I put the buffer Tower in there right now I'm doing the support rib and each of those features when I design it I design it in completion I'm fully surfacing it it's now done and then I will uh then I tie everything together as needed like obviously I have this joint right here I have the grip uh tied into the everything ties together but that's how I'm thinking about when I'm doing this I'm not just like focusing on this little curve here I'm focusing on the support rib that's my that's what I'm designing right here I I I I I I I I totally get that but like they aren't small features I mean that's this is these are all major major base level features I'm putting in the the radius at the top of the report the support group is a base feature yeah you can't you can't put this radius you can't put this in later this radius is absolutely critical to the support rib properly integrating into the rest of the of the of the lower I can't like just leave that like put a big clunky guy in there I'm gonna try to radius it out later that's not gonna that's not gonna end up being properly smoothly integrated all right uh Hoffman Tim I think you're gonna regret going this way and let's make a bet okay let's make it back I will find you a [ __ ] bottle of hydrogen I will find you a bottle of liquid hydrogen and have it delivered to your farm I don't think I don't think that's you might as well offer me a nuclear weapon I think you well you can't find like a liter of liquid hydrogen no I mean not yeah you're gonna yeah you're this is more challenging than you think work on those work on those infiltration those facility infiltration skills because you're gonna have to break in to get a hot air balloon ride I will pay for a hot air balloon okay for the two of us that's more like it all right I will pay for a hot air balloon ride for the two of us if you get to the end of this project and say this this this was the right way to do it if you get to the end of it and say uh yeah I I think chairman was right uh I will then pay for the hot air balloon run no no you have to overnight me some of your finest milk and cream in uh [ __ ] you know icebox so it's fresh when it gets to me in San Antonio okay yeah we can do that I think that's that's fair and you know either way either way I win I either get a hot air balloon rod with Hoffman or I get Hoffman's Fresh Cream yeah okay I think I think we'll go with that I I think we'll go I don't know I'm confident I'm gonna like this but uh well I I I've set up a bet where I win either way well I mean okay I I see it as okay you could definitely look at it that way um I mean I would agree a hot air balloon ride is always a win so that's good all right we've never been you've never been in a hot air balloon I haven't no shockingly I've actually got a bunch of books I'm getting I have a bunch of balloon specific books coming in actually on the subject I mean I I know you don't like hot air balloons on principle but they are balloons and you can't rely on them hot air balloons are still lighter than air and they're still in the in the in the greater lighter than our family and they still deserve our respect and admiration so absolutely yes um and uh anyway also we have Middleton made uh in the in the Stream and yes we are surfacing that is uh what we are discussing today um okay yes I will take you up on that it's official everybody here on the uh stream all we have I think like 55 people on YouTube and uh 32 on Odyssey so uh yeah absolutely we will probably do another cat stream when I finish this up then and we will talk about it then if that sounds reasonable has chairman Frozen I think Chairman's Frozen yep I think he's Frozen yep we have we have uh lost chairman he is now Frozen oh he's dropped that he's probably trying to fix it okay so it is getting way 47 minutes past when I was planning on ending but we're almost done here I just wanted to finish showing you guys uh the uh support rib idea here so I'm not sure what chairman we'll see when he comes back okay um okay yes um Neko Ivan says Caz streams are so underrated I'm glad you're enjoying it and this is I know taking a long time but that's how these streams normally go um it's kind of a back and forth I hope you guys are learning something here as we go and and discuss different uh esoteric things ah there he is there he's back there you are we lost you for a little bit I don't know what happened I uh I completely lost internet for like 30 seconds there oh well yeah you just froze up and then disappeared so we're thinking I don't know eraded or something not just uh which is weird because I have like excellent Google Fiber and that usually never happens does he look different guys is this like is he like not is he wearing different glasses or no he looks the same no looks the same all right just making sure like there wasn't a sudden you know uh harjay style swap in the background different Professor okay so um comrade what are these uh armaments that we are seeing on the screen um yeah so uh so so uh yeah so armaments we're actually designing this is architecture this is a new building it's going into Dubai and um swimming pool goes in here yeah we're just kind of laying it out nothing nothing it's too exciting ah looks like American uh M15 rifle uh very good very good very good um so okay so so the last part that I really kind of I still haven't totally figured out and this is I this works but I'm not totally happy with it I I'm trying to integrate this rib into the the what I'm going to have down here eventually and uh the way I'm doing that is I'm just using my favorite little split line and then delete face to eliminate uh part of this radius right here or that that top it's not it's not really a radius it's a it's a complex curve but to eliminate a uh a piece of it and then I uh put a boundary surface to kind of resurface that down to this curve right here this is kind of this is the Terminus this is this is where I want the support rib to terminate into this curve this is where it terminates can you zoom out a little bit that actually oh you see that's where the support was going to terminate and then I have another surface that kind of extends forward into the magazine well and then on this side over here I have the same surface that then transitions into my right side reinforcement so it's all symmetrical up front then it goes to a rib and then different a different reinforced on this side which I don't have drawn yet but I I kind of use this surface to uh to bring me down to that curve and then I obviously I can't this this Edge right here is not tangent and I end up being at a sharp corner down here so I just use a split tool to uh to split to split that guy and then delete and then I use the surface fill tool to fill them back in and add like a nice little radius there and that actually really Blends I'm super super happy with how this came out because this Edge right here this Edge right there is not a radiused edge that edge is not tangent to the inside surface of the lower it's a sharp edge because we want to have we want to have the rib as close as possible to our upper receiver for maximum strength and adding a fillet or any kind of radius or tangent surface there is simply going to be making us have to move the move the support rib further out making it thinner and that's no reason for that so this is going to wrap around here there's going to be a sharp edge here and then it's going to transition into a curve down here later on but that's that's a minor feature we don't add now we add that much later um so that is what I do there and then the last and most tricky step is um we add a surface I'm basically just using this surface to create a 3D sketch obviously we've talked about this so I put this surface here and I just split that surface right there and I'm generating a a line that's obviously three-dimensional look at the end there and that is um I'm doing this instead of trying to use a 3D sketch so this is like if rather than using 3D sketches this is like the right way to do it never use 3D sketches guys Hoffman and I are in 100 well he he says that there is a use case but yeah I did use one um let's see where where is it but not 99 of the time do not use it seriously I may not I I seriously might have actually gotten rid of it earlier and and gone to a better method um seriously I'm looking I don't see a 3D sketch this is this is funny stuff don't don't use three no no no there is one there I will show you it okay I do have a 3D sketch buried in there I will show you so yeah I I agree seriously guys 3D sketches are not good like that they are bad that the three Sketchers legitimately there are better ways of doing it I will show you the where I use the 3D sketch and we'll just quickly talk about why so this entire plane is just here for reference geometry just to get that line so we get rid of it later I then add the uh the the outside surface which is based off of a bunch of different curves you can see we've got a bunch of Curves in there right here just trying to define the curve um this surface goes all the way down into the middle onto the inside it's basically that entire side is the outside surface and this is the hardest part to get like right the place I use a 3D sketch was right here so this is a 2d sketch drawn on a plane and this just kind of so okay I gotta back up just one second here so I have this split line let's just come up let's come up there let's just back this up make everything visible just a second there we go so this line right here this line right there is the junction between where I want my support rib to meet my lower receiver that's kind of the cutoff line that's so this is one of the this is one of the lines that is uh part of that surface that makes complete sense yeah right I mean obviously because if you don't do this then you don't have an even uh uh you don't have an even uh line where you where the two surfaces you you have to Define where these surfaces come together yes exactly and the surfaces don't the surfaces don't end there the surface that the support rib surface goes all the way down to this line down here um because for various reasons I won't I won't want to go into that in too much detail but basically I have this surface this this line here I this line um I want this line to be part of this line right here this basically is all one big uh guide curve right here and if you look at it carefully you will see it is indeed three-dimensional so the only reason I use the 3D sketch here is I used a split line to generate this this uh Edge so I have these edges right here I can use I just split out to this surface these surfaces are are curved that's that's a curved surface Tim I yeah I don't I don't see any dimensions on that 3D sketch no so uh just a second this this sketch right here has Dimensions this is a 2d sketch [ __ ] it the purpose of this sketch is it just connects it connects that line right there over to our buffer Tower and it's sitting at a weird angle it's sitting at a weird angle um I was I was I was hoping you slipped up no no no no not here uh not here um it's sitting on a plane right there so that's all perfect right but the problem is I need to be I need to take this 3D sketch right there I mean I need to take that 2D sketch right there and connect it into this line right here yeah that's tricky yeah so the way I do that is with the 3D sketch I take a 3D sketch boom you'll notice there's no dimensions on that right so this this is a 3D sketch right here and this is the only time I would use a 3D sketch it's I'm just pulling sketch elements from other sketches and other features and just dropping them in here so obviously that right there is just using a transfer tool that's fair you're just you bought you're combining some of these stuff I'm combining several different sketches together in the 3D sketch and this is the best way to do it so hey I'm not yeah shockingly that we do have a few people still watching so I know this is ridiculous almost 50. I I I I I I think uh 49 Middleton's about to leave but yeah and I'm about to leave too actually but but I I know we're right at the end so I I just want to touch on you know some just really basic stuff how would you recommend someone learn to 3D model in any like program aside how would you recommend someone kind of pick this up from scratch because there's people who are just watching this because we're fun dudes like you know yeah that's uh a good question and I would say if you want to learn a 3D model you need to have something that you want to design first you have to have something you want to design uh just copying stuff you know you need to have something that you that you have a goal a purpose the reason you want to design it it needs to do something you have to have an idea in your head of what you want to design what it needs to do that is your starting point and then from there you need to just even outside of CAD you need to develop what that part is going to look like like just a cat is just a place for taking an idea you have and then turning it into an actual shape that you can use in a computer to 3D print stuff or whatever you actually have to have the idea to begin with you have to have something you want to do so obviously that would be the first step think about something you want to do and then uh just jump into the CAD program and start using basic tools to try to draw it um so I'm I I I disagree fully with Hoffman there but that's okay okay all right that's what I did so I I I think that the best way to learn to do CAD is to just grab an object doesn't matter what it is just this is so boring you will get you will get burned out so quickly doing this it's it's the best way to learn because you can check your work grab an object and this is easy if you have a 3D printer because you can just print it out and check it against what you're trying to model grab a 3D grab an object grab a pair of calipers and start figuring out how to translate that object into your CAD program if you're trying to learn from scratch you don't know any cat like you're you're literally just starting to get into this modeling an object that you grab from your environment I think is the best way to just learn the basics and okay I mean that's a fair point you you get to the point where you yeah I mean you design in CAD I mean I so do you do you sketch I'm curious do you like my sketches I do actually I'm not going to show anybody any of them because they're kind of scary but yeah I do actually um I have a notebook obviously so ideas go in the notebook to begin with to try to record them what I want to do that's super basic that's like no geometry just like basic concepts and then while I'm I'll do most of my working out my geometry in CAD but I always have a piece of a piece of paper on hand uh just to draw like I'm trying to work out with the way I want to lay my surfaces out like around my trigger guard down here I'll I'll definitely sketch different ideas up for that before I try it so yeah I find that very useful because it's a lot faster and uh it's just it's just really fast the visual help me visualize stuff so yeah I do do that to some degree but not like we're so we're so yeah we're just like completely wildly different like I I I I I I never sketch on paper I just I just don't I just opened cat I'll open cat without an idea and I'll just like start modeling you know oh my I mean I I understand that cat is an incredible tool for helping you visualize and understand what you want to do I mean I do that to some degree too but I'll always do a little bit of sketching just to try to solidify my idea unless it's something simple I mean this this was like I I always enjoy doing a stream or a conversation with you because like we're we couldn't be more different people but like we're into the exact same thing and like have the same passion for it and it is funny how uh yeah how different the way we do things is well you know I mean talk talking to someone who is just doing stuff exactly the way you do it I mean that's incredibly boring what's there to learn very little and it is very boring yeah that's why it's so interesting yeah I mean it's the way you do things it's so different like I look at it like wow like I've never even tried a lot of these techniques before yeah I mean and most of them actually I mean like you know I'm getting ideas looking at how you're doing this and I mean it's I never would have considered doing this in a solid modeling program but I I can see the advantages of what you're trying to do here like I mean it's not it's not it's not the program is very fluent in both solid and surfaces sure of course uh it's just I've never seen someone do this in a solid modeler because you know it's always what I've always assumed is like there's no point in doing that in a solid model or because it's a solid model or you can just start with a solid and refine it but you're you're clearly getting good results here so I I wouldn't have even thought to approach it this way I mean I'm I'm very interested uh I might wait for you to get a little further along in this model uh and report back before I try it myself but it's it's it's really an interesting way to do things I mean it's I'm I'm I'm fascinated by how you're doing this um just yeah it's I I know I said I'm so this is kind of new to me as well because I just started this I've been doing this basically like the last week this is all I've been doing like I need to be doing a video but I've just been kind of obsessing over this lower trying to get it where I want it to be and uh this method is kind of what I've fallen uh what I've come to and I'm just trying to bring up show uh let's see I mean the the results speak for themselves I mean uh shockburn just left left a great comment there's no wrong way to use cat if the final product is what you dreamed and it works that's and that's what's so interesting about cat is you can use it in so many different ways um with so many different results I mean you can do the same you could you can get the same result with many many different tools and methods yeah I mean like you know it's it's it's it's CAD like Tim Tim loves some of my models but when he sees my feature tree he he literally gets anxiety like he can't wow he's not kidding his feature tree is really really scary no it's it's really scary yeah so that kind of sums up all the the the surfacing type techniques that I'm using right now I mean it's not super complicated uh really you you just if you're going to use surface you need to have a good reason to use it obviously on on the stuff that that Chairman's doing and like with the support rib and the pistol grip here and even you know these features right here on the the trigger guard these are all great reasons to use surfacing obviously I'm surfacing everything here like as we've been discussing that's not this is if you were just going to design this magazine well surfacing would not make sense you're wasting your time because you could do it way faster with just the one quick Extrusion feature and then a quick cut um so you have to have a good reason to use servicing to do it but if you're looking to do more complex curves or more complex geometry it will make your life much much easier so I would definitely most normal people use surfacing more like I do where you're combining solids and surfacing from the get-go I I I'm really into what Tim's doing here but don't be put off from trying out surfacing and think that you have to do a fully surfaced model yeah that's what I'm saying no no you don't you don't have to you can you can use surface C to make like for example what I did in my earlier designs is this entire thing was solid modeling the only surfacing I did was just for the support rib this was all solid and I just surfaced the support rib and I just and then after the support was surfaced I just basically just attached it uh attached it to the rest of the solid model Yeah Tim that's that's not a criticism I'm just uh I don't want the folks at home to get scared from trying surfacing I can't think and thinking situations the situations here are that this method is more difficult that's not nice that's not an insinuation my my gut feeling is that you're a crazy person but all right this is going so yo so yeah you do not have to do a ridiculous amount of surfacing and all kinds of this complex stitching stuff together in order to use surfacing to excellent effect anywhere you want to have some sort of nice curved part which you're kind of struggling to do with extrusions if you're designing a handgun if you're doing a Glock frame you're doing an m p you're doing a 1911. if you're not using surfacing for your core ergonomic features you're leaving a lot of good stuff on the table you know if you've spent 10 20 hours on this model and haven't used surfacing that's just that's like I mean just think just think about you know you're gonna don't spend that much time doing something and do a substandard job learn these tools get familiar with them you don't have to use them to the extent that Tim is I mean Tim is showing off extreme surfacing and that's not a criticism that's that's I don't know um it's it's not that scary guys this really isn't I mean this entire feature tree here has like um I have like it's not it's not big my feature tree is Tiny all this like scary surfacing I have this little tiny surface I don't know I have like 100 sketches I'm at like if I do a sketch right now I think I'm at uh let me just let me let me we actually get let's see what this is I'm at uh 105. I have 105 sketches in this model that's not the instruments this is this is little now it'll be a lot bigger when it's done obviously but this because this is just the basic part but that's not a lot this is this is easy I just did this I started this model from scratch without any features in it just a blank document I started this last night and I worked until about this about 11 last night so I started I've been working on this maybe for like nine hours now that's it and we've got we've got to this point so it's really not that bad it's really not that bad um yeah so to close things up what I'm going to do is I'm going to hop over to the um oh the second I'm gonna hop over to the Odyssey chat we're gonna run through there and then uh we're gonna close out for the night chat yeah so it's just surfacing is actually as long as you have a good application for it it's much simpler than uh yep uh there we go surfacing it's really not it's just finding it with curves like I mean you saw what you're doing today it's really not that it's really not that it's really it's it's much easier to make complex features like this mag well this you know this grip this type of stuff uh you know you you can use servicing any way you want you can use it to fully Define a part like uh Tim is doing here you can use it to modify a more primitive part like how I tend to use it and you can do anything in between I mean it's not it's not an end in and of itself it's a tool it's great for references like I mean I I use it you use it using surfaces as reference geometry for something else yeah it has a lot once you start understanding let's start using it it has a lot of use cases to make your life a lot easier I mean I think we can both agree that if if if you're spending significant time in CAD and you're not making heavy use of surfacing I mean sure if if you're doing like milling and like machine parts and you know just simply if you're doing yeah if you're doing basic not 3D if you're doing 3D printing you really should be using surfacing but yeah you can make what you're designing better um without any compromise so the end user trying to print it you know if you're trying yeah if if you're if you're doing 3D printed guns you really should be using surfacing to just make what you're designing better yeah yeah just start experimenting um especially if you're using something like if you're using something like SolidWorks or yeah I mean like no one out there uses solid Edge I don't think at this point it's probably not very very few hey Google Holdings uh the Aeron chair is better in my opinion but the embody chair I mean you can't go wrong with it uh I I just think that for the sit you're going to overpay for the embody when the Aeron is cheaper on the used Market there's a lot more used Aeron chairs out there and it's it's just as good a set I mean I I sit in it Aaron that I uh acquired used but hey if you're buying new you know I think they're equal s esoteric chair talk I'm not sure what they're discussing but we're talking about high-end uh desk chairs ah okay interesting um so we have a good question here so I'm just going to go through we only have like just a few of them over here handling over Odyssey um we have what is the uh from Bigfoot goes boom um what is the advantage of solid Edge over solidwork so if you want to quickly expand from the past but just the quick difference it's it's free yeah and uh the biggest one for me is I think the part assembly relationship Dynamic is a lot more user-friendly intuitive it's a lot easier to work on a part in the context of the assembly and reference those small you know reference details from other things uh using solid Edge but from the capabilities side I don't think there's a difference at all I mean they they they're and for doing for doing the texturing the like the stuff that I do you can only do that in SolidWorks so I use mesh based tool which that's a mesh based that's a mesh based tool that's proprietary to SolidWorks so um I'm a big fan of solid Edge but realistically if you're only going to have one program installed on your computer and you want to do stuff like this with the texturing you're better off with SolidWorks um I think there's major advantages to solid Edge but I'm in the minority there okay yeah so I mean what he's saying is have both but solid Edge is currently actually free for you to legally download and use for personal use which is quite awesome actually yeah that is that is that is a big advantage and it's not a slouch of a program I do I do all my cad and SolidWorks and then I just put the tech I do all my cad and solid Edge and then I just put the textures on and SolidWorks so yep and then um uh ventilate accelerate says lots of utility work um engineering is still done with AutoCAD writer voice sketches for comms power Etc so that's what we were talking about earlier AutoCAD 2D sketches of a lot of layout stuff like that it's it's used a ton and a ton of professional that actually makes perfect sense that makes perfect sense um I totally see that I've done some layout stuff with solidwork sketches actually and it's just not yeah it's not there I mean uh AutoCAD is optimized for 2D Drafting and it's it's the best at it yeah um let's see does does there's there's plenty of Lock 17 stuff that I have out there I'm killing I'm I'm killing the 17 on V3 though um I'm I'm not gonna I'm I'm revising V3 and uh the 17 slide isn't gonna be a part of that and then we have an important question here um which is hi from B Free or Die Trying hydrogen isn't hard to make just got to work at how you want to compress it so if you're making hydrogen on site you actually there is no real motivation to compress it you don't need to so hydrogen is actually pretty difficult to make on site it's expensive to do um there's a couple ways to do it the only legitimate way nowadays is to use a uh electrolysis setup and that is not as easy as people would think uh to get pure hydrogen in the quantities needed for lighter than our aircraft that's really interesting I I I would have thought that it was isn't it just like a wire and some water I didn't think it is and I've done that I it's that's easy to do the problem is you get amounts of hydrogen that are tiny the amount of hydrogen you need for a balloon is orders of magnitude more than you'll generate with your little homemade device in a year kind of that's kind of the order of magnitude there also making the hydrogen pure without any Oxygen contamination is also more difficult um occurs requires careful design so easy to do shitty very difficult to do as well as you need to exactly basically yeah I mean that you can get commercial uh equipment it's in it's all six figures so that's uh I think that is the best option to fill balloons um relatively low cost and uh if you can get decent price electricity um but yeah it's actually not not super simple Let's see we have uh uh uh what material uh classic uh question and uh pla plus yeah it's gonna be pla Plus or carbon fiber nylon one of the currently those are the two best options uh PL I mean pla plus is an amazing material it really is you get you give up a little in like long term like you know if if your subjecting subjecting it to like very high heat over a long period of time like it's heat I mean he is even Sunshine I've had I've had I had an orca lower fail doing the sunlight actually was um but um but yeah it's a structurally it's an incredible it's incredible stuff it prints awesome incredible layer adhesion great impact resistance for long-term stuff um some carbon fiber filled nylons there's a few options some are better than others but I mean there's nowadays there's a lot of good options I think so I mean that's basically what's boiled down to for me those two options and and that's that's that that I completely agree those are the only two materials I print guns in yeah and it's the same here I mean there is some interesting filaments with their esoteric and they're they're not there right now they're not there yet uh okay over to YouTube we have a few last questions on YouTube so that's everything for Odyssey um let's see uh yeah so Simon on my my my devices go to sleep there we go Simon Claire says organic shapes are easier on your printer and that's true I mean just not having short a sharp curve just means your your head has to slow down and speed up again why would you make it do that also a flat surface shows imperfections more I mean you know my my frames look so good printed because there's very few flat surfaces you know it's either texture or a bunch of very organic curves like it's hard to spot problems yeah yeah it it hides problems a lot better yeah though your prints should look good anyway but um you know um but yeah no absolutely if there's no when you're 3D printing making things with sharp Corners like traditional guns have that's because they're Machining them uh if you're not if you're 3D printing it you have a whole different set of design requirements and I've talked about this in other streams you know designing for manufacturer designing your part to be optimized for 3D printing rather than using more traditional techniques like you'd find with uh with with Machining so what what would you call that Tim like a fancy term yeah like something I will I wanted to avoid that word if possible oh I don't know oh affordances I I have to think I have to think crossing a river but not crossing a river not crossing a river affordances that's so that's I'll have to have to remember that we're avoiding forwarding exactly um Okay so let's see AutoCAD is a huge step up from drafting by hand yeah that's true um but I'm not 3D modeling in it also true um okay so let's see let's see there's a few of these we've got to knock through these threes um um 360. so Fusion 360. I assume new beer solid Edge installed during the stream awesome way to go time to learn something new I have a firearm built from each of your designs and really respect you both thanks for the knowledge uh you guys awesome that's uh uh Michael that's uh that's awesome I'm I hope you are an example to the rest of the viewers to uh get yourself some solid Edge and uh step up your game Buckle if you're uh if you're on Twitter and you have a tech question just uh at me and I'll do my best to uh give you a hand awesome yes um let's see [ __ ] see Simon Clara said it's been done with radio he's referring to making hydrogen you shake water apart that method there's a lot of uh there's some other methods actually as well using uh electricity using heat basically I mean obviously there's the iron contact method from way back when there's a lot of different ways of doing it but none of them are easy to do with the scale needed at home it looks easy on paper but to actually practically do it's still very expensive we will be doing it here at some point but it's not it's not something to be taken lightly um my capacaria says hydrochloric acid plus uh uh zinc and yeah there's actually the the method that's been accepted historically was to use sulfuric acid and iron um to produce hydrogen the problem is it's actually stupid expensive like you need a huge amount of of acid and iron to produce gas I mean you can balance the equations out yourself if you don't believe me but yeah it's it's very very expensive getting that much uh it's it's ridiculously expensive to get that much ingredient so yeah that's not really a good option let's see um yeah that this is also a problem potentially [Laughter] um um question for me would you consider making a version with all the surfaces nope for metal plating you don't really have room I mean I don't metal plating is so thin anyway I don't think it'll be a problem yeah just just metal plate it as it is if I inset if I inset anything you'd have holes uh I just played it as is um shockburn says can I design a lower with u-bolt front lugs um actually the front lights are really interesting my problem is using front lugs that I can use with standard takedown pins with a proper detent which I really really like so probably not I'll probably be continuing the new lower is going to have a different style of freight front takedown pin plate kind of more integrated in a nylon and it should be not the only reason we've had failures uh I don't know if you've had a failure but I've seen some failures with plates and it's mostly due to them being made from polycarbonate which is what I make my front plates from for various reasons preventing creep and such because of their current design and polycarbonate has fracture issues under certain use cases so I'm gonna keep using printed plates probably moving forward for the foreseeable future with an option for easier to make metal plates so we might have an option for metal plates as well if my new design works out I'm going to have like a different capture nut design so we can just use a simple two-dimensional plate with no complex features which should make it very easily laser cuttable we'll see I love it exactly yeah let's see Nick says has resident printing gotten to the point where it's viable um as far as I've seen no even the new residents out it has very very serious it has very serious basically cross-linking it doesn't it's uh very brittle even though it is weird because if you described both of these Technologies to me like I was a fighter alien like if you just if you described fdm Printing and you know resin printing I'd be like well it sounds like that is stronger and it's just one of those things that it's never reached the like potential that it sounds like it should be at uh yes and he's gonna say no no also cure ultimate a good slicer the answer is no and there's a slicer the answer is yes so you should Cura is just backwards the way it's designed that it's just it's backwards and they have a poor the sdl viewer is for Quality it's chairman disagrees I know no you're you're right on that front but the the output is actually pretty good and it's pretty easy it's no better than other slicers yeah but it's easy to use and it has profiles for everything it has backwards like not well tuned profiles I would just I don't know I would check out process slicer they have done a legitimately really really solid job um that's what I use there's literally nothing wrong with prusa slicer it's good but excellent Cura is also good I hear it installed I had a couple of times and I've just always just gone back to prison slicer because I've just it's got a weird workflow you're a bad boy I thought I find the person slicer workflow incredibly weird I really don't you get everything set up you load your model in and you slice it boom and you can flop back and forth between the sliced View the mesh view it's like what could be simpler yeah you're stuck in this little all your settings are in this little tiny box you can't make it big like you got to scroll and scan through the little menus to find settings it's like okay well hold on hold on like search in the news let me revise that uh cura5 [ __ ] sucks because they did two things that I hate you can't expand the menu anymore my gosh that's even worse like you can't drag it to make it bigger yeah I know that's even worse drag it every time I think a little bit bigger it it remembers its settings when you open it but here's the big okay fine okay here's the biggest sin that ultimaker five [ __ ] Cura 5 committed and it's Unforgivable they put on smooth scrolling and you can't turn it off so when you're using your scroll wheel in the menu for the settings it tries to like Smooth out your scrolling so you're not at like your scrolling is like disconnected from what you're actually doing on the scroll wheel yeah it feels like it's rubber Bandy and I you've heard it from the man himself oh no I absolutely hate it but it still is a good job slicing but okay I I just their interface is so bad I I hardly ever use it anymore because I yeah slicer well my only printers now are cheaties and uh my bamboos so I I either just use um cheaties slicer which is just a pretty good version of Kira that has the land stuff for their printers baked in or I use bamboo slicer which is pretty good uh it has some problems has some glitches not all the way there but it's okay yeah um yes I don't know okay so we'll we'll agree to disagree on that one um so uh Milo says I know how to model a bit but I'm worried about doing that when these programs are online and upload to the cloud Fusion 360 at least is there an easy way to circumvent this uh solid Edge yeah so solid Edge it doesn't it probably reaches out to their licensing server does it not yeah it pings the licensing server on start but it doesn't but like yeah it doesn't send it and if you disconnect your internet connection I'm sure it's still open well it I don't know how that would work because I have a SolidWorks license but it also it connects to their server but if I turn internet off I it won't lock me out I don't know so solid Edge license is actually a bunch of different ways so you can do a local license which is something that I do from time to time you could also do a licensed server that you own and run so that's what we do at work uh we set up a licensed server and you know any computer that wants to open Solid Edge reaches out to that license server that we own and run and opens that license file or you can do you know a cloud thing where you reach out to like Simmons to you know authorize when you open up so they give you flexibility and I actually just don't know what the how the free edition I'd assume that it either reaches out to a Sim and Siemens server or they just give you a like local license um either way it's not always online and it's not like Fusion 360's online setup yeah that's that's just like an opening to license stuff so like if you were really worried about that I mean you can I mean you could you you can block you know I mean yeah uh I don't think it's a big concern with with the software running on your computer there's ways to to deal with that yeah it's it's this is industrial software I mean the the the IP considerations alone for sending Telemetry about your actual models back home are pretty serious yeah um it it and and we know it doesn't do that at least for you know like the the actual commercial versions we use you know we're we're pretty tight about about that um so yeah so I don't think it's gonna be Fusion 360. yeah it's I I don't I don't like cloud-based programs at all yeah it's it's not a cloud-based program yeah so it's I don't know it seems pretty legit to me just looking and I've downloaded I have it I haven't just haven't played around with it um so let's say we have one more question here I think which is from Simon Claret again and he says or either you either of you printing the rdb9 um I think he's referring to the Belt fed nine millimeter um no but I'm interested have you seen that no when did it when did it drop it was a guy on it was the guy on weapons Guild that's been developing for a couple years and he just like put it put it on Odyssey recently like he came out of nowhere have you have you heard of that I have I haven't really seen much of it though yeah it's roller delayed he has I mean I downloaded I got he's got super super cool like really great photographs in his documentation it's a very involved build though I am not working on it right now um I have looked at it though and I have all the files and I have it for reference and stuff so it is it is quite interesting you know that that I've been meaning to do a build with a G cast so maybe that'll be one we do together because I know he said he wants to do it yeah yeah I I remember him talking about that so if he's building one I might I think I'll build one with him yeah and uh I think it's this is this is a good place to uh to drop off uh 3D arms says weirdly you can resin print Dentures yeah I know it's weird I'm not even sure that works I I I I I feel like you could not you know fdm print Dentures they just wouldn't be very you know comfortable but they re but they resin print them all and I'm not even sure like I don't want resin in my mouth that seems weird but I guess they have like yeah I mean they wasn't print boxing gloves bicycle helmets Yeah um I'm I'm waiting for someone to pirate uh carbon's design engine uh check it out it's pretty cool look up carbon design engine they have a whole thing for uh basically um doing tuned elasticity with 3D printing uh in resin thinking any elastic material really yeah yeah I see that that's uh that's cool yeah it's super cool GDs drought work but the the software costs a [ __ ] [ __ ] ton of money and it to my knowledge it hasn't been cracked yet so first one fingers crossed the bracket because I mean that is I mean working with rubbery materials with resin I don't know I mean there are some there's different resin printing Technologies out there the resins that you can use with your face it's not the font it's not like yeah I know I know that I'm a thing but yeah yeah I know that I I know that but I mean but you have to have the right resin to make it to actually print real Parts with it but yeah it is like resin printing does have some really really cool things you can do well stuff like this would be really cool like the carbon design engine I'm waiting for that to come out because that would be awesome for gear I'm looking at right now yeah it's it's pretty insane you should check it out but hey yeah I I I I gotta drop off uh same here I'm it's I'm I was gonna drop off like 10 minutes ago but I think that's that's the last comment so I think we're all through I mean we have some more but nothing super major um okay so I'm gonna you you missed his next comment okay so um all right so with that I think uh we'll just if you want to sign off chairman and yeah oh okay what was that about to say hey how many people watch this through to the end I I don't know if if you watch this from like beginning I mean how many people do we still have oh oh well that doesn't mean they watched it we have 40 watching right on YouTube and 37 over on Odyssey that's that's I I I was expecting after three hours of talking about the most nerdy [ __ ] we'd have a 10 people watching so hey everyone thank you so much for watching and uh absolutely if you've decided to check out solid Edge due to my glowing recommendation please [ __ ] ping me on Twitter if you have a solid Edge question I'll do my best to answer or at the very least point you in the right direction to find your answer it's not a big community so I got you know I want to help yeah it's uh and definitely I mean it looks like it's pretty cool you can get like fully serviced professional CAD software for free uh which you can do all kinds of stuff with you know for personal use of course um so that's super awesome definitely check that out thank you everyone for watching um everyone has been here uh yes Odyssey For the Win everyone who's out on Odyssey watching thank you guys for being on Odyssey who knows how long I'll be here on YouTube I didn't think I'd be here a couple months ago so we are still here on YouTube we're also on Odyssey so everybody on YouTube be sure to head out to Odyssey subscribe to me out there odyssey.com and follow me out there for the next stream as well and drink a glass of raw milk for Tim absolutely guys all right so thank you very much and I will catch you again uh sometime later hopefully next week all right good night

Channel: Hoffman Tactical

Views: 10,982

Keywords:

Id: mILU7dpqroE

Length: 211min 2sec (12662 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023