FreeCAD: How Do You Create This Surface? Creating and Surfacing Wire-frames Using Curves Workbench

hi everyone welcome to the channel and today we're going to be looking at patrons question now this is from Les Eccleston he's very talented miniature Creator from over in Australia now he's looking to model this phone box and the main problem that he's having is this top bit now you can see we've got a curvature on this top here and if we look we can see that basically it's a square with the top coming down at these four points and we've got a technical drawing here of all the dimensions Etc we're going to be looking to see how we can actually tackle this top bit there are a number of ways of doing this we could do a loss we could see if we can do it by the surface workbench I'm going to take approach from the curves workbench so in freecad and I've created a new document if we look back at the photo we can see that this feature has this curvature on top and also it has a lip so we want to create this feature here so there are a number of ways of doing this with loss surfaces Etc but what I'm going to do is think of this as a wireframe and recreate the wireframe of this part I can create a sketch here and create duplicates and rotate them and mirror them across it there are a number of ways of doing this so let's go back to freecad and first start in the Sketcher and create a new sketch and we're going to go along the X Z plane and hit okay I'm going to use the endpoint and rimpoint Arc I'm going to create a symmetrical across this point here so I'm going to connect it to this access and what we'll do is create actually rather than just two arcs we'll create free so we have some full control over those and we'll create something like that let's put some tangency across here so using the tangency we could select one in the other and then create tangency across those but because I got three I'm going to select the tangency straight away from the top making sure nothing's selected and then select these two hit OK this means the tool is still active so I can select these two now and here okay I'm going to hit escape to get the mouse pointer back or right Mouse button and we need to make some symmetry constraints with these so at the moment we've got this Arc here so I'm going to take these two points and this Center Point and use some symmetry constraint and we'll do the same with these ones as well and this Center Line and use symmetry across those so now we've got this shape that we can fully control so I want something like like that let's Place some distance between these two of a roundabout 100 milliliters so we've got our shape and I can control the curvature of this with these three points I'll do for now let's close that and we're looking from the top of the moment let's come around to the side so the front and you can see that there so we've just sketched this Arc here and we're going to create a wireframe of this feature so I'm going to need four of these arcs first of all we need an additional workbench to work with so this is an external webinch we've got to tools and add-on manager and use the filter and search for Curves workbench so this one here the curse word bench and we click on that install that and that works with nerve surfaces and also we've got tools in there to strap out curves Etc and we're going to need this for the workflow that we're following so we just got to install that I've got it already installed I'm going to come over to that workbench and click on curves so create the sketch I'm going to change this into a single Arc Now by using this tool here the join curves that joins all the Curves in that Arc the reason being is that we have a single edge to create a nerve surface from and this works with something called a golden surface so now I need to create duplicates of this and bring them out this way and here to do that I'm going to use the draft workbench now the reason why I'm using the draw for a bench is because it has Drafting and snapping tools to allow me to rotate and snap this I've got the snapping tools enabled so you can see this padlock here it's enabled and we've got snap and point snap midpoint and snap Center Point sometimes you'll find these up here under one of these drop downs and you can pull it down if you want I've got one here I couldn't come up to the view and the toggle axis cross so we can see the center there when we're using drafting we must make sure that our plane is selected so this is our work and play make sure nothing's selected and we want to rotate this around the Top Lane so the top here so we want to rotate this along this plane this way so make sure nothing's selected and come up to the utilities and select plane and select top so our plane is now set we've got our Arc here and I'm going to click on it and come up to the modifications and come down to the rotate I select the top so we can see what we're doing so we're going from the top and bring this down on the left hand side here we've got some options and the option that I'm looking for is the copy I click that when I rotate this it'll create a copy what I'm looking for is the point of rotation so with our snapping if I hover over this point you can see the snap endpoint as enabled click once and we get this line if I come over to the right hand side this is going to be the point that I'm going to handle the rotation with so this snap endpoint again click once and we've picked that up and rotating around this point as I move the mouse it rotates if we look to the left you can see the rotation changes I'm going to take my finger off the mouse and type in 90 and hit enter we get a 90 degree angle so basically now we just repeat the process for the office by selecting the join curve modifications rotate always remembering that the copy is selected and looking at our rotation Point our handling point and rotate this up and type in 90 and hit enter same again take this join curve modifications rotate make sure that the copy is selected rotation point handling point and this one's better because we can snap to this point down here and if the axis Cross isn't in the way we'll just add some rotation and we'll bring this in and snap two there so we've got that there let's turn the Grid in off we can see that and we've got our wireframe because we got the wireframe with the join curves I can now come over to the curse word bench make sure nothing's selected and I'm going to use something called the Golden surface this one here crazy Surfer that skins a network of curves so this is the network of Curves and we'll select those all those from here or join curves this one's become enabled and we'll click that we now get the golden surface as you can see here and we've skinned those curves with that we can now add some depth to this now we may want to just extrude it over in the part web inch and click on the corner surface and using the extrude and selecting the Z and we can say we want this say 80. so we've got that there we can screw that down and cut the bottom off from here doing some booings or even using the part design and create a body in there come to the model and take this extrude and place it within the body therefore I've got a base feature and I can select the face and create a SketchUp on there and decide what I want to do so I could take off this bomb like so it close and create a pocket and do a through all let's take the bottom off like so and hit okay and start my modeling in here if we look back we can see this is raised so the feature here we could do a part offset so that's just delete that body bring back the extrude I have to delete that as well and click on the gun surface press the spacebar to bring that back so for that we need to offset that that's come over to the part workbench and we click on the golden surface use the 3D offset part 3D offset we got the offset in there we need to make that filled so fill the offset and we can increase the offset to what we want like so that's going outwards and we've got some nice clean edges and with that we hit OK so we've got that now at any time we can come into this sketch and change the length or the curvature of the sketch let's bring this down to say here and hit close and we get a different style so different curvature in there looking back at the reference image we can see well we've got this in here so we do need to extrude downwards somehow and again we could use wireframe techniques say that's create a line going down here and create a rule surface across here or a surface or we could cheat using freecad what we can do is extract out this space there's a number of ways to do that we could use the part design and use the sub-shape binder or we could use the draw for a bench I knew something called a face binder so slap the face and on our drafting we've got the face binder and click that what's happening if we look at the model we get a face pointer here and that selected that face in there and binded that face so it's similar to a sub-shape binder and we can take that and add some Extrusion so we've got Extrusion here let's say of 50. but you see that well it's basically gone the wrong way so rather than adding the Extrusion in here that's zero that back out and hit enter we can add the Extrusion elsewhere we can extrude face binders over in the part workbench take the face binder get extrude make sure we select the direction because before the Extrusion went this way so the norm of that shape was actually going this way rather than up so Z axis and we'll go something like 100 millimeters and that's place that in there so you can see we've got that shape in there let's change his screw it a bit to something like 50 mil so you can see we're creating this shape in here and it's a case of basically getting the links right and again using some cut features in here either a Boolean cut to cut this away or dropping this into the part design workflow so coming over to something like the power design perhaps a model threat body take that extrude and we can drop that in there now one thing to remember that the offset and this extrude are not joined together yet so we're just drawing those together a rhythm apart workbench take those two and create a union so this one here which is a Boolean Union part Boolean and Union now they've created a fusion we can drop that into the body and we can work upon that make sure because we're using offsets that if we're coming to the fusion the offset is hidden make sure that's hidden we've got the golden surface still showing so press the space bar on there so all those are hidden in there we're now working in the Active Body which means we can use part design workflow and create a SketchUp on here new sketch and looking at our feature well we can do a pocket across here close that and use pocket approval so cut that off okay that and we can add our lip on here as well we've still got this dip in here if we wanted to then we could extrude this right out and cut further up it's just because we haven't screwed it enough and we can just always go back into the original Fusion into the extrude which is Extrusion of the face binder just click on that and we'll set this to something like 80. and you can see something's failed so our pocket has failed and it's resulted in multiple solids and the reason why is we look at the sketch what's happened is that now this isn't pocketing all the way here so what's happened is it's pocketed this way and it's resulted in two bodies so we just take this pull it down and close that there we go so we've got that now and we just select the bottom new sketch and I'm doing this freehand obviously you would add constraints or what you want on here like so and we'll close that and we'll Pat that it's going to go this way which is right and you can see how we can build at the top of this object up quite easily so I hope that's given you an idea of how to create such an object like this how to tackle an awkward surface and use the curse workbench with the part design workbench so I hope you found that useful and I hope to see you again in the next video if you like what you see and you want to donate to the channel then you can do so via Kofi or coffee at Ko hyphen f i.com forward slash m-a-n-g-0 or via Paypal at paypal.com full slash PayPal me forward slash Darren b e Stone I also run a patreon where you can get Early Access and additional content and that's at patreon.com forward slash mango jelly Solutions links can be found in the channel header on the about page or in the descriptions of these videos I thank everybody that's donated so far it really helps to keep the lights on so I can produce more content and also expand the channel thank you for liking commenting and subscribing to these videos and I hope to see you again in the next one

Channel: MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD

Views: 10,961

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, freecad 0.19, freecad 19, freecad basics, basic course, fundamentals, learn freecad, freecad beginners, freeCAD 0.20

Id: t4QSIlxreao

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023