FreeCAD - More Powerful Surfacing |JOKO ENGINEERING|

so i've shown some ways to make a mouse in previous videos and that used surfacing in free cad but not quite like how i'm going to show today this is a new method this reminds me a lot more of how i might do it in solidworks this uses tools from the surface workbench in freecad and before i just was using exclusively surfaces that i've made from the part workbench so let's go through some of the strengths and weaknesses of doing it this way and some of the tools that are used in the surface workbench on freecad so first i'm going to create a reference surface for the top of the mouse and go through some sketching and if you don't want to follow along with that i'll probably put a timestamp in the description so you can just see the surfacing relevant part but if you're following along and like to make this from scratch let's get started i'm going to start by going to the sketcher workbench in a new part and let's sketch on the right playing the yz plane i'm going to make an arc we'll make it center point coincident onto our vertical axis here and maybe i'll make another one so i got two arcs and i've got my hotkey keyboard manager here in case you need to see what keys i use but we're going to say t for tangent we'll get these two points put together and maybe i'll do a horizontal to our origin here we'll go shift r to make a radius and i want this to be how about 50.8 maybe i'll do a radius over here at say 152.4 millimeters i'll have my circle center point be vertical in fact let's add a horizontal constraint too so it'll just be coincident onto our origin and we'll give a vertical relation to the origin as well one degree of freedom left so let's give that a horizontal so we have sort of a mouse profile fully defined sketch from here let's switch on to another sketch and actually let's have nothing highlighted when we go into the sketch and we're going to say our yz or front plane the first thing i'll do is import the tangent point between my two arcs and that'll be a good little connector here for another arc alright so i'm going to choose my body of my arc we'll give it a coincident relation we'll give this a radius how about 76.2 we'll add in a horizontal between my two endpoints and maybe shift h for a distance of 101.6 millimeters and finally i'll want to add a vertical relation to the origin to make sure that this arc is nice and center so we'll say vertical there and close all right now i just want to create my mouse surface and for that i will use a part sweep type surface we're going to choose our utility to sweep right over here i'll sweep my sketch 001 to my select profiles selecting my sweet path i'll hold ctrl and select my two arcs will say done and ok there we have a nice mouse like surface and just like in the previous video let's trim this surface out to get this to be what we want there's a few methods that you could use to trim this out what i'm going to do is only one way of doing it my xy plane will be my top plane here and i'm going to switch my view to wireframe so i can still see the outline of my surface but i can see my full sketch i'll create a arc and i'll have my mid plane be coincident or my center point of my arc rather be coincident onto my vertical sketch axis we'll make this have a horizontal relation with the h key between the two ends of the arc we'll give this a a radius and let's assign that radius of say how about 72 and i'll have a vertical relation relative to the axis with shift v or relative to the origin rather with shift v we're going to say 37 millimeters right and then i just have to give this say maybe an edge to edge width for a full constraint and i'll have that also be 72. i'm going to switch over to an ended rim point arc now let's go with a tangent and we'll get these endpoints to be coincident shift r will give this a radius of 25 millimeters and i've got one degree of freedom left i'm going to leave that for now make another arc and we'll make sure that these endpoints are both tangent and coincident and now we'll give this a radius perhaps a hundred millimeters and then we'll give this kind of a tighter three-point arc again tangent and these are not connecting up i've seen this before in fact i just uninstalled and reinstalled freecad to do a quick test so i know i've got that one issue that can be easily edited so we're going to come over here to the sketcher and we're going to say auto constraints i'll just toggle that a few times and apply and then we'll come over here to constraints and auto constraints there close and open my sketch and that should get me so that these end points will actually snap together when we want them to snap together give that a quick try yep they're snapping together again so quick and easy fix there you've if you're watching this video you probably already know that trick on how to restore that we'll give this a shift r again and make this 10 millimeters in radius here maybe we'll go 70 millimeters down here and we'll make sure that the center point is vertical with our origin and that way we know that it ends on horizontal i'll give this endpoint shift v negative 108 relative to the origin and i think we've only got one degree left and so i'll take this little second guy and give him a negative 82 relative to the origin and we're fully constrained now i can mirror things across this axis here or i can just remake the sketch real quick now it's up to your personal preference whether you want a mirror or not usually my preferred method is to just hurry and remake the sketch real quick by adding constraints and relations all right so we got that if you mirror you just have to re-add some relations that aren't copied over and it's not bad but sometimes it just gets a little bit more confusing and you can have some good design intent by adding the constraints and relations the way that you would intend them to be so we're almost done here we're going to add equal and we're done now all right so we have a fully constrained sketch i'm going to close this and i think what i'll do there's again several ways to do this and i have done this in several ways but with this sketch highlighted i'll head over to the part workbench let's do an extrude i have the create solid box checked i'm going to say 200 millimeters symmetric okay the point is i just want my solid completely intersecting my surface i'll change my view back to as is right so i have my surface and my solid and if i choose both let's create there we go an intersection and i just kind of trim my surface to be exactly how i want it to be right you can also do like a an extruded cut or some other kind of boolean so don't think that this is the only way to do it uh so i said i was going to sketch out a lot let's go to the next sketch i'm going to go to the x y plane i'll revert back to the same view of wireframe now let's have this center point be coincident onto this axis shift v uh we're going to go with something like about 54 millimeters now shift r to give this a radius of let's go with a hundred and maybe i'll just give this endpoint a horizontal distance with shift h of negative 30 right and we're going to go with i did not mean to make that coincidence so i'm getting rid of that constraint we're going to go with tangent shift r to give a radius of 35 and now we should have one degree of freedom which i will leave for now and let's add another arc in here shift r we're going to make sure that that's 40 t for tangent make sure these arcs are tangent let's do another three point arc now again t for tangent shift r do something a bit bigger maybe 20 millimeters give that a vertical to the origin and i didn't snap there so we'll get those together t for tangent all right looking good next shift v relative to the origin will be say negative 115. but it looks like i have an over constraint so oh i need to auto remove so getting rid of uh constraint 14 there we go now i should be able to shift v negative 115 let's go with tangent here shift r i'll make this 75 i want to make sure that i have a vertical constraint with the origin so i know that that arc ends horizontal and then maybe i'll choose the second one here shift v will go negative 65 millimeters and that should be fully constrained so i said i'd do a mirror this time in case anybody wants to see that let me adjust my workbench just a hair i'm going to choose the elements in fact i could just box select everything i wish to mirror and then lastly the axis i want to mirror about i choose this mirror button here and you'll notice it comes in but not at full constraint right so i'm going to choose the symmetric relation and choose specific points to be symmetric about my mirror axis and that sometimes gets trickier than this but i think in this case we stand a pretty good chance of now we still have a degree of freedom right and that's where it gets a little bit tricky where is our degree of freedom so i think what i'll do because everything that i'm going to click and drag is probably not going to work i'm going to change this 100 to a 90 and you can see that these points come apart so i'll delete this dimension altogether and let's merge these points right we still have a degree of freedom so i can't change that dimension but if i get rid of that then we have a fully constrained sketch but then it says that constraint 25 is too much so mirroring just gets a bit more complicated people always ask me how come i don't mirror and that's why now we have a fully defined sketch and i'll just simply do kind of what i would would have done in the last time and just add this in make it tangent fully constrained right so just different ways of doing the same thing all right from here let's do an as is and i noticed that the corner of my mouse is drooping kind of low there that might not look very realistic so let's change our profile on our common just a bit i'm going to go to my extrude and edit sketch 002 instead of ten maybe we can make this real tight like two if we close that nope that didn't help twenty that gets a little bit narrow so maybe i'll go 12. let's try that that's not bad i'm just going to up it to 15 then so we'll close that right we have a bit of a narrower mouse it's looking not too bad go to my sketch 3 and maybe i can make this negative 110 and that might be a bit more of a realistic look okay so that's the mouse let's begin surfacing now that we have a sketch and a surface to reference off of and to do that we're going to go to the surface workbench i believe this just default comes with freecad and i might want to start out by making a little bit of a guide so if i go to the sketcher we're going to go here i'll choose my right planer my yz and i'm going to in the sketcher let's import here and here and then i can make an arc from these points i'll go to my right view now and say shift r and we'll do something like 25 millimeters all right that gives me a little bit of curvature opportunity so when we start sketching we're going to the surface workbench and i get these two kind of handy buttons over here this one is what i want to focus on right now creates a surface from two three or four boundary edges so if i click that let's create a surface between the edges of my surface of course you can see when i hover my mouse over my surface only certain parts of the edge of the surface light up those are usually representative of either sketch elements or maybe places where i might have cut the surface to the right shape with other sketch elements so the surface has broken up its edge into certain pieces that i can use for modeling i'll click add edge over here and choose this first section and then add edge down here you can see we've created a surface between these two elements now what if i want that to have a different curvature way that's why i made my sketch so i'll add another edge and now the edge of the surface conforms to the curvature of the sketch that i used to specify now we can possibly add another edge let's see what it looks like and you can see the view didn't update so if i try to add that it says curves are disjoint so i'm going to remove my last edge and say okay and there i've created my first surface i can do the same thing to continue this onwards i've got to click add edge first we'll go from here to here and probably to here right and that's how we can kind of negotiate around that curve there and i can continue on down here now something interesting might happen over here if i add my edge from here and here here you can see how that works but that's not quite how we see a mouse edge going so i'll add another edge over here and that works but you can see at least the shading might indicate there's a little bit of roughness in that surface there and so that might not be an ideal way to go so there's ways that you can break up the surface into multiple parts let me give you an example let's say i want to do the back end of this mouse now and i choose my surface tool add edge and i go from here to here well what if i want it to end at the halfway mark instead of go all the way over well there's a way to do that because you can see that these unique sketch elements sort of divvy up the surface into unique parts that way when i go to highlight this edge the yellow highlight comes in and only certain parts of the edge are highlighted and we can use that to our advantage what i'll do is go back to my original surface and it should be sketch 002 again and notice i have this arc that's going all the way across so one little trick is to make this for construction and simply add two arcs in its place and that way you don't lose any of your existing dimensions or anything like that so choose the coincident and go from here to here we're going to make everything coincident to that axis and then to this arc and i accidentally added a coincident relation that i didn't mean to so i'll just choose here to here merge those all right we're going to go equal there we go right so i have a fully defined sketch but now we have two arcs that make up that center point so when i go to close this now this is divvied up in half because i made it with two arcs so when i go to surface this i'm going from here add edge to here and we've created a surface now if these edges come in twisted there's a few options the easiest is to just flip orientation the most complex but nicest is to add a little sketch like we did up here which will straighten out a twisted surface as well so what's another tool that we can use to help us finish up this mouse if we're getting kind of a rough surface if we try to fill in this face over here well the other surface tool is pretty nice actually let's say i want to fill in the bottom of this mouse it would get rather tedious to come in here and add edge right because this only lets me select up to four edges so if i try to select more than that then no it won't work because two requires two three or four edges so i have to make a bunch of surfaces down there if i want to fill that in that's not nice so what i can do instead is this nice filled surface right and if i add an edge the trick to doing this other tool is to add the edges in the order that they're connected to each other so don't randomly choose edges but go around the perimeter in sequentially selecting all of the next edges and when you do you get a nice surface fill so unlike the other tool this doesn't have a limitation on how many edges that you can select and it's quite handy but there's another little secret to this tool what if for some reason i wanted a mouse that had a slight concavity to the bottom well i can do that with this tool what i'll do i'll first delete this surface well yeah i'll delete it just so you can get a better visibility on it we'll go to the sketcher and i'm going to create a sketch to kind of outline the concavity so right i'll get on my yz plane and i choose my start and end points of my profile and i'm going to run an arc from one end to the other and let's say i want it to be about that concave i'll make that a 500 millimeter radius so we'll close that and now when i use this tool i guess i'll fast forward so you don't have to sit through me selecting surfaces again i've recreated my surface but i can come out here to unbound edges and i can add an edge that look at that dictates the curvature of the bottom of my mouse so that is a pretty remarkable feature that freecad does it really reminds me a lot of some of the cool stuff you can do in solidworks as well so we'll close that and now if you're astute you may say well we had a rough time with you know creating a surface in this next part of the face what if we used a filled surface instead and let's take a look at what that might look like i'll add an edge here and then i'm going to keep on going around the mouse and it does generate a very nicely smoothed surface so if i say ok well now we have half of our mouse filled in and we can simply mirror the surfaces from one side to another and that really does begin to look like a computer mouse i gotta tell you free cat is really impressive in how able it is to do some of this stuff but what if i want even more control right well we can do it for instance what if this surface didn't fill in and i think a decent example of that might be if i delete this surface and that gives me some reference errors but that's okay because i can deal with those i'll go to my sketch sketch 005 broke so we'll just delete that i've got a few things broken here so i'm going to remake part of my sketch on my right plane due to some of the reference errors and that's to be expected when you go messing with stuff from here to here shift r maybe i'll do a steep angle right maybe 50. close that and we'll do the same on the right plane in the rear just to repair some of these broken references real quick we'll go from here to there we'll go to the right view shift r 50 again perhaps close that so what if i do a filled surface from one end to the other if you don't know how it's going to turn out i believe i do so let's give it a try i'm going to go from here and i'll just fast forward this you don't have to sit through me collecting all these edges monotonously and it actually does work you can see the surface comes in a little bit more rough so that may not be a good recommendation but my point is even if that wouldn't have worked which i have had mice where that didn't work there's ways to get around it and i want to show you one and this will also help make the surface a bit smoother as well so i'm going to create in the sketch i'm going to select first three points i'm going to select that point right there i'll select this point right there and this point down here so i've got these three points selected and as you know three points makes a plane so i go to create a sketch three points plane and we notice we have a plane now that goes through all three points now i want to use my import tool and i'll import two of the points that i've just created there and there and i can make a three-point arc right look how nice that is so we're going to say shift r to give that a radius 30 millimeters is fine now i've got this little radius that dictates some curvature and there's a few things i can do with that i'll again fast forward so you don't have to sit through me monotonously clicking points but we'll go to the surface and choose my filled surface here all right so i've selected the exact same thing that i've done before but now i can choose my unbound edge add edge and that can sometimes influence how that curve works but of course it didn't work this time and i can't expect a single example to work in every way that i wanted to but that's an example of one way that you can influence the curvature this is the way that i'm more inclined to recommend i choose a filled surface i'll add edges and this is usually and you know i've discovered this in solidworks and freecad no matter what platform i use if you have trouble surfacing you usually want to break it down into smaller bits so instead of using this as an unbound edge let's use that as our boundary to our surface and when i do that okay that also doesn't work but the the point in that is you can do multiple surfaces while using this as a boundary and there's not really that much of a consequence to it all right so filling the entire surface can be a struggle and doing it in parts may or may not work and it may or may not solve the problem in this case it hasn't solved our problem but if i head to the surface workbench and i create you know a surface again where i add edge and i just use this to help me sort of negotiate around this part of complex geometry right so now i've created a surface that gets me around the corner without errors or any problems and i could do the same thing as before i'll add edge well now i can have several options as before i'll add an edge here and if i fill this surface oh but i did not do it in sequential order my mistake so you can actually see what the error oh but it worked okay that's a surprise to me but i guess sometimes you don't have to do it in sequential order but if you ever get errors or get errors downstream focus on doing it in sequential order so now if i fill this surface again goes with my fill surface tool and i'll add an edge i think it's best practice to select these in the correct sequence though just in case look how much smoother that surface is so i think hopefully this part is a good example of how you need to have both of these tools work together to really make some good surfaces at least in some cases now these aren't the only tools on the surface workbench because you have some up here too which i will go into in another video and there's some that are available in 0.19 that are pretty intensely awesome so let's actually work on mirroring these surfaces right i'm going to choose all the surfaces that i want to mirror and we're let's do that from the part workbench i'll choose the mirror feature over here and it looks like these are pre-selected i just choose my yz plane and these mirrored nicely next now you've seen how i can make the mouse have a concavity to the bottom of it so this time i'll just choose a flat bottom mouse which is a little bit more realistic to a mouse and i'll create yet another surface uh so we'll choose a filled surface as before and i'll fast forward so you don't have to sit through me clicking these and there we go now you'll see that i've probably i wasn't paying attention to what i was selecting there but i was probably selecting a combination of sketches and surface edges and i'd feel inclined to say that in free cad if you're doing a serious project not just a quick here's how you do a video right in series projects choose sketch elements before anything else and that usually results in the least errors next so we have these surfaces and i'm going to save the mouse right now what do i do to make this solid and for that you can install an external workbench known as the curves workbench and the curves is an external workbench that you can install either through the add-on manager so tools add-on manager you can install it from there or in at least linux you can also use your terminal so if we go to the curves workbench right this is also concerned with nurbs surfacing and things here we have a solid that is pretty much watertight of surfaces and when you have something that's quote unquote watertight i can select all of the surfaces that form an enclosed volume and then on the curves workbench i see this green cube that says make parametric solid from selected faces and when i click on that i can hide all of my surfaces all right so now that i have this solid uh mine and i can test it out to make sure that it's really solid i can do something like go to the part workbench create a cylinder right and i have the cylinder that i can position in the mouse and then i can choose my mouse and my cylinder and do a cut and i created a hole because it is now solid so i know that this is solid i mean how impressive is it that free cat is able to do all this i hope this video was helpful if it was please subscribe and i'll see you in the next [Music] you

Channel: Joko Engineeringhelp

Views: 28,166

Keywords: joko, engineering, help, jokoengineering, engineeringhelp, ACADEMY, jokoengineeringhelp, tutorial, how, to, howto, engineer, JMT, EXPLAIN, EXPLAINED, GOENGINEER, KHAN

Id: Mi_r4mgBGeg

Length: 35min 21sec (2121 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020