FreeCAD Restore Curvature to Mesh; Part 1 |JOKO ENGINEERING|

so here i want to go through um recreating mesh from curved surfaces so here's a sample part with some curvy surfaces uh from phillips i made this pretty quick in freecad you can download this from grab cat if you like so i've saved this as an stl file and i'm going to go ahead and open it so here's an stl file of the same thing you can download this with grab cat from my grab cat in the description if you'd like to follow along and sometimes it can help to see the mesh and that can be easy as changing our draw style to something like flat lines now you can see all the flat faces that are put together to represent something that's curved and the big question is how do i make this have actual curvature again and there's a few methods and probably no right and wrongs depending on your design intent but here's a few tools on how you can start to re-smooth some of these meshes this is a good example here if i go to the front view right this is a bunch of very straight lines that are put together to become something that's curved so i to edit this one very effective way is to turn this into a solid as of right now this is just a graphics body so to make this solid we'll head on over to part where sorry i'm in the part workbench let's head on over to highlight this mesh body and we're going to say part create shape from mesh all right so we've created a shape or at least there we go we see it pop up in the history tree here on the left we've created a shape from the mesh now we can highlight this shape in the history tree and we're going to say part convert to solid and that's how we make a solid now i can even delete these two things if i wish i'm going to hide them with the space bar for now and now i can choose any part of this and go to my sketcher and create a sketch we're going to choose the flat face option of course so we're sketching on the face and now i can make a circle right i can import this line and i can create a circle maybe we'll make it coincident onto there and i'll choose my center point of my circle and choose a coincidence on to there and i can just make this circle a little bit bigger than my mesh i can even since this is a bunch of straight lines i could probably make the assumption that i can import a point here and make my circle coincident onto that point and assume that the circle is going to turn all these sections into smooth sections now to avoid any possible zero thickness from a boolean operation i'm going to assume that i have the tolerance to make my circle a little bit bigger right so maybe 10.15 millimeters that's probably a 10 millimeter circle we'll close that we'll go to the part workbench we're going to extrude we'll go 10 millimeters and let's see if i can find my reverse in fact i think even symmetric would work there we go reversed symmetric and reverse kind of undo each other so i'll just choose reverse and say okay i'll choose my body i'll choose my extrusion and choose make a cut of two shapes and now i have a very smooth circle right so that's one way that i've just added some smoothness into a mesh body i can also go back into my tree and edit my sketch and i can get rid of my dimension so one of the complicating factors of doing this method which is probably better if i close this my circle is going to be extruded through every sharp point and so you would assume that this is curved but you still have every individual face which may give the appearance that it is not curved so be careful doing that method and you have possible zero thickness complications that is just going to be apparent in every cad platform because of the way that zero thickness works right you have that in solidworks you have that everywhere so what's another way that i can work with this and another this is a pretty simple part right and if i just roll this back um let's see let me get rid of my cut with delete and we'll get rid of that and that and so now we just have this solid and then of course everything else in the tree is invisible right now one way is i can say go to my something like part or part design workbench i'll go to my sketcher but this will probably work in either part or part design i'll start sketching on my top plane i can simply remake this part in a simple way as i can and i'll toggle my transparency to wireframe and i'll choose you know something like symmetric and then i can import something here you know and i can just start using my solid as a reference to make this part all over again now anybody watching this is probably very familiar with all the operations that i'm doing so i'll just try to go through this really quick so i don't waste anyone's time we'll close that back to part we'll do an extrude and i don't recall how tall this was so i'm going to start with something like 30. and i okay i got it that's got to be 30 that's perfect and then what i'll add a few fillets maybe and i'll change this of course back to as is so i can add a few fillets and i'll in fact select this edge and then choose fill it and i don't recall exactly i'm guessing it's going to be a five millimeter fillet nope that's probably a 10 millimeter fillet so let's go back and edit my fillet edges and i'm going to say 10 right you can just use this solid as a way to perfectly match everything you're doing there so i selected all my edges that i wish to fill it and i've done my fill it and then i can go here and i'm guessing that's like a three millimeter shell let's give that a try right we'll say there is extrude apply a thickness we'll try making that maybe five millimeter and i want to have my thickness towards the inside so maybe i'll stick a negative sign on there and yeah i think it's three let's try three nope we're a bit inside so three point five there we go so it's three and a half millimeters and it's just so easy when you when you're at least working with a model that has some nice round numbers to remake that and that didn't take me very long to to remake right so you can use your solid as a reference when you sketch and make things to remake this uh curve from the first place but you bet there is some more techniques that can be used and there's one that i'm really excited about uh so i'm going to get rid of the solid that i've been making and you're in my sketch right so we're back to this solid this is a pretty exciting one let me go to the surface workbench i'm still working with a solid and i need to have a solid to do this so be sure to convert this to a solid and this is freecad 019 where you have some cool new features but this should be available in 118 as well this little filled surface here and i can choose my boundary edges right i can add an edge here and add an edge here and here right i'm just choosing and this is especially useful that i can see my mesh so i know which ones to choose add an edge here and i can say ok and if i go transparent you can see i've rebuilt this face as a surface and then i'll come over here and i'll choose another filled surface and as you can see i am remaking the planar or straight or otherwise predictable surfaces surfaces here there we go and that one right okay and now i've got two faces rebuilt and i'll fast forward here so you don't have to sit through the monotony of me doing this but i'm going to rebuild all my easy to make straight surfaces now this one is a little bit more challenging because you can tell we have a mesh which makes a bunch of you know straight edges seem like which approximates the curvature through a bunch of straight edges so what we're going to do instead is i'm going to sketch on this face with the sketcher and then it should be pretty easy to identify things that i can import right from here to here yep to here right so i have these nice lines and then i simply draw an arc i can on my keyboard which will bring up my keyboard monitor since i'm going to use a hotkey here here's my keyboard monitor if you need to see my hotkeys i'm going to say t for tangent and that fully defines our arc and i'll simply do the same thing on each of the four corners so i don't even have to know my arc size because that just comes from how i've imported my mesh oh it looks like i need to import this side as well and then this last one so i've been able to quote unquote add some curvature through the sketch back in and i'll add four lines now line here line here up line here and line there right so i've used my solid to create this sketch we'll close that and now with my sketch highlighted i can head on over to the surface workbench and simply fill that like it's a surface and i can also let's just let's actually hide this body here and now click on the filled surface and we can add some edges and we're adding edges on the sketch just like we've added edges from the solid it computationally should be one in the same so we've added all this and okay right so now i can utilize my surfacing to be able to restore additional curvature and it should be pretty easy to head on back to the sketcher i'm going to choose this line and the end of this line which will establish a plane normal to the edge that i've just selected and we choose to make a sketch and instead of three points plane we want to make sure we'll say normal to edge and our sketch plane right is right on that edge we've selected this edge and this point and we've made a plane normal to the edge that we're sketching on i click my import and i can import this point here and i simply draw an arc and in this case there's many ways to do this right we can do a swept surface or we can do what i like to do a filled surface it seems nice and reliable first things first i'm going to select let me get normal to my plane here there we go i want to choose my origin and this point and we'll put those together and then i can choose my arc center i'll make a vertical constraint there you can also just put it right on the axis if you wish but we are constrained there we'll do the same thing right we'll choose this point this edge from our sketcher we'll do normal to edge and we've established a sketch plane now on that bottom edge and i can import this here and i this is just a personal preference you can do a center point arc if you wish i like to grab both ends with a rim point arc and establish e equal i hit the e key there's my equal close that and now i'm back again to going to the surface workbench we can choose a filled surface from here we'll add an edge here here and i'll just add another edge even though it's probably unnecessary and we've established another surface we'll do the same thing where i'm going to do the exact same thing right here so i won't bore you i'll just fast forward through this great so we've uh added and restored our curvature to these two edges how do we continue on with freecad let's go with showing my solid once more this time how do we deal with this well i mean there's a few ways right i can make a sketch and just draw a rectangle to represent this whole face and make the cut later which is how i feel inclined to do it or i can try to tough through it some other way but let i think it's easiest really to sketch on this face right so we'll head to our sketcher create a sketch because all we care about is four points i care about this point and i imported a line there but it ends at the point that i care about we care about that point that point and lastly that one and as before i simply use a surface to fill that in so i'll uh oh whoa i'll make that invisible we'll do a filled surface and we'll add here and this edge and here it's probably not necessary but i'll add that fourth one as well and then i can go ahead and add in these two now what if i went to part and chose mirror and i mirrored let's see i think it's surface fill 005 and i did so across the yz plane right so that option is open to you right so you can mirror stuff and i'm just going to control z back before i made the mirror and i'm going to say o 4 and double o 5 across my x z plane or my y z rather i've been able to recreate those surfaces a lot more quickly so last thing to do how do i fill in this bottom portion so what i'll do and there's really again no set in stone way of doing this right you could probably get this done with a sweep in fact let's try that right because we haven't tried that but these are going to line up so i can choose here oh i have to choose this little end point in fact i'll use the space bar and hide that so i can select that end point and that line will grab our sketcher and we'll sketch whoops i think that thought it was a three-point plane so let me try that one more time there in the end point we'll sketch this with a normal to edge there we go let's import this line or that point there and i can choose that arc we'll go horizontal bam just like that right so we'll close that now we can probably just do a sweep let's find out all right we'll run to the part workbench we'll run through utility to sweep i'm going to choose my latest sketch as a profile i'm going to hold ctrl for my sweep path and select this entire circle we're going to say done okay and we've recreated that curvature really easily right that is one easy way of doing it let me delete that now and let's go with one other way of doing this i'm going to make another sketch well see you can kind of mirror what we've done before and choose sketcher normal to edge and even easier we can import our last sketch and of course my personal way of doing this is a run point arc that's made equal you can also do a three point arc on the three fully defined points i'm going to say close to that same thing here we'll sketch normal to edge which is a super handy feature that freecad has i'm sure it's been around for a while but some of these convenient features really don't get old horizontal we'll close that right and what i've really essentially have done is i've enabled myself to go to the surface workbench we can create a filled surface here we'll add an edge there so i've added all these edges and i've created that but this can be a filled surface too because i've kind of made the sketch wire frame if you will right but there are some possible oh that actually looks really good though there's some possible and for imperfections or things that could happen but that's another way of doing it i like the sweep myself but i wanted to show another method of doing it because sometimes one method won't completely work and then it's pretty easy to just fill a surface across these bottom actually i think i've already done and i've made that invisible right so we'll just make that non-invisible all right so we've got this now there's a few ways to do it right you can try to maybe do a union between all these surfaces and do an offset and fill the offset and whatnot i think the most simple way of doing it is uh kind of replicating uh how we made the part in the first place so i'll go to the surface right we're gonna do a filled surface and i'm just gonna add edges and this will lead me to filling in the top okay and then we can head on down to curves this is an added in workbench and you can find add-in videos on my channel on how to add that in if you need and then we have this uh where's my green square there we go so i'll highlight all my surfaces i see it now i've got my little green i guess it's a cube but i have to highlight everything and this works when you make a watertight solid right and then here we have make a parametric solid from selected faces so i'll do that and then there's my solid i've hide my i've hid my surfaces there we go and i'll show my solid right so that's the solid that i've made shows up in my tree and i can head on over to part we'll choose utility to apply a thickness i'm going to make that there's negative one and i'll just step this up to negative three point five so that's one one way of doing it right there's many ways of doing it but now i was going to go into how to do nurbs surfaces which is a different concept entirely but this seems to be running a really long time a lot longer than i intended so let's make this part two nurbs surfaces i'll see you next week i hope this video was helpful if it was please subscribe i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Joko Engineeringhelp

Views: 10,414

Keywords: joko, engineering, help, jokoengineering, engineeringhelp, ACADEMY, jokoengineeringhelp, tutorial, how, to, howto, engineer, JMT, EXPLAIN, EXPLAINED, GOENGINEER, KHAN, FreeCAD, Restore, curvature, from, mesh, format, file, stl, obj

Id: KP8dU9tDaSk

Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020