Plasticity 1.4 | Dimensions and Measure Tools | What They Do And How To Use Them | #plasticity

in this video we're taking a look at plasticity 1.4 there have been some big improvements to 1.4 and specifically what we're looking at is going to be dimensions and measure these are things that have been in the works for a little while and something honestly that is going to take plasticity from a tool that is mainly for blender users or polygon modelers to something that anybody that is looking for a cad tool for 3D printing can use so in this video we're going to look at some simple examples as well as this motorcycle triple clamp to get a better understanding of how these tools work and maybe where some of these limitations are so first things first let's take a look at an extremely basic example so we can take a look at how this works I'm going to start by just simply modeling a rectangle and extruding it out in 3D now I didn't Dimension anything when I first created the rectangle even though we do have that ability but now I want to figure out what size this thing is and maybe make some changes to it so the first thing that we're going to do is find the measure tool so I'm going to start typing measure with the F key then you can see it's control plus equals now when we use the measure tool what we're going to be doing is selecting Edge references or vertices on these edges so if I go from this Edge to this Edge for example let's go ahead and just pull this one out we're going to do control equals and I'll do a point to point for this side and then I'll do control equals again and I'll just grab this edge here now you can see that we've got three dimensions length width and height now there are some cool things that we can do but first let me explain the basic premise of the measure tool and that's to add these dimensions on the screen so we get some visual feedback we can of course use our direct modeling tools like offset or extrude and these are going to update the dimensions in real time however if you're coming from CAD these are not clickable this is not something we can directly manipulate that is the job of the dimension tool so if I hit the equals key this is the dimension tool so I'm going to select my first reference face I'm going to select my second reference face then I'm going to find the dimension tool which is equals on the keyboard once we have this we can see that a dimension is displayed 92.75% a cylinder or a sphere now this was done with a rectangle and extruded but it's actually in the background it's the same thing if we simply just select the entire object and hit equals it will display all three of those dimensions for us so we can say 125 tab over to the next one set it at 50 tab over to the third and maybe set this at 45 and hit enter so when you're dealing with Primitives that have not been modified yet then we are able to do this if I make a modification like fill it a corner or if I come through and add a hole to it and I try to use equals it's not going to work anymore so this only works until you've modified it we can hide the measurements we can hide the object and let's move on to our second object here now the second object has a couple of features that are at different heights the first thing I want to know is what is the height from this Edge to this Edge or I can simply grab this horizontal one here drag it out 15.27% I need to select my reference face first shift select the face I want to move hit equals and set it to 15 mm so now that I've reset that the next thing that I want to note is that we can select multiple faces we're going to select our reference first any face that we want to move and then finally the last face is going to be the reference for our measurement if I hit equals you can see the measurement value is 15 if I simply hit enter it's going to move all faces to that Dimension if I do this again and set it to say 20 it'll move all of them to 20 so again this is a great option that we have and the dimensions that we add with the measurement tool those are going to be updated visually based on any geometry changes the dimension tool itself will physically update the geometry but there's a little bit more to this and let's go ahead and take a look at one more example before we move on to the next one so I'm just going to add some simple cylinders here they're all going to be different sizes and they're going to be at different locations on this block so now I want to make all of them the same size let's say that this is the correct size here so what I need to do is select the ones that I want to change first and the correct size last and I'll hit equals it'll automatically use that last reference as a dimension and if I want to change them all I can simply hit a value like 20 mm and change them all the next thing that I want to do is I want to move them into the center of the block now if we don't remember the size of the block we could can always use our measurement tool it's at 48.54 so let's say that we want to change that Dimension I'm going to again go over here say equals make that 50 so now I know the center of it is 25 mm so I'll select this reference face shift select this hit equal and set it at 25 mm puts it perfectly in the center and again remember the first selection is our reference the second third anything up until the last one are going to be things that are going to move the last one is going to be the reference Dimension so if we want them all to be right in the center all I need to do is hit enter and say okay now that only accounts for the One Direction but obviously we could use this in any direction by simply getting those references we're going to go from this side to this side hit equals it's at 100 we're going to leave it at 100 and then we'll simply put this one at 50 we'll put this one here at 20 let's go ahead and undo that and we'll put this last one here at 20 as well so again you can go ahead and do the quick direct modeling and come back and refine your designs as needed let's go ahead and take a look at a little bit more complex example now this is a motorcycle triple clamp I did not model it for any specific dimensions but it was modeled in a section and then it was mirrored across the XY plane so because of that it presents some interesting problems with these tools the first thing that I want to note is we're going to use control equals and we're going to measure this Edge it's at 30.6 MM right now I'm going to select the inside face hit equals and say that this is supposed to be 30 and hit enter now in some cases this will work perfectly fine however the first time that you resize this because it was created with a mirror it's not a true cylindrical face it actually had a split in the edge and this means that sometimes your dimension reference will end up going to zero so that's something that you need to pay attention to if that happens all you really need to do is go back and delete that and then reapply your measurement by selecting The Edge again uh that's the really the only thing I found with that the second thing is that the measurement tool on an open cylinder like this is not going to give us a true diameter value it's going to only give us the radius that's not a big deal but that's something that we should consider we can't toggle between radius and diameter it does still allow us to reset the dimension let's say it's supposed to be 52 mm and it will update that properly and if we do the same thing over here we're going to set it equals 52 and it updates that as well now one of the big things that we are going to run into or problem when we're dealing with symmetric modeling like this is if we are trying to figure out the distance between these two cylinders that distance is going to be something that's a little bit trickier for us to manipul iate right now it's at 214 mm 267 and if I try to make that a specific Dimension it's going to move the first selection and keep the SEC or it's going to move the second selection relative to the first so what this means is really you should work in symmetry as long as possible by modeling half of it and once you're happy with the dimensions then move over to the other side if you absolutely have to do something like manipulate this after the fact you can potentially come and create a plane so if we extrude this as a reference and I select this and shift select this hole and say equal we can set this to 108 mm but keep in mind that that is moving the inside face and it's not taking into account the chamfer that means that the inside and the outside cylinders are going to be at different distances so if I select this outside face and and want to move that relative then again this is going to be problematic because it's moving them relative to their own geometry there will be limitations to this of course if you've got a lot of intricate features like chamfers and fillets and things like that that's going to complicate the process even more but it is still possible if we create intermediate reference geometry and we can use that to manipulate the the locations I'm going to do contrl Z and sort of pull things back in line where it was let's go ahead and move that there we go so that's a basic overview of how the dimension and measure tools work in plasticity 1.4 there were some other improvements I'm not going to go over all of those in this video cuz this was honestly the biggest one for me if you have any questions on this please let me know as always thanks for watching we'll see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Learn Everything About Design

Views: 17,086

Keywords: Plasticity, cad, design, 3d modeling, cad for artists, dimension, measure, 1.4, update, how to, tutorial

Id: kATCRYZKE7U

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024