WhoCanDo

I'm seeing a lot of good ideas coming through here. I started with the sweep but failed. That doesn't mean that I got the setup right though LOL. Just to confirm. The split-pin that is protruding, is press fitted into the bolt. A compression spring is extending from the top of the bolt (not shown). When the bolt is turned 180°+, the split-pin is to slide along the horizontally cut solid subtraction so that the spring is tightened by half a turn. That is why it is so important that the sides of the slot are all horizontal as it goes. Even though I have a solution, I'm going to have a go at some of the ideas above so I can experience the tools and methods.

Nice one VE I can use this for my next development. However, for this one, when you fillet the top, the center of the circle is not the center of the pipe. If I rotate the development to align the center of the circle to the center of the pipe centerline, the side of the circle is not perpendicular to the pipe center plane. If I rotate the development, the left side is not perpendicular to the centerline plane. Therefore, I ended up working from basics. I drew a circle on the centerline in the front view and extruded it. If I subtract solids at this point, I will have a hole in the wall. But before subtracting surfaces, I duplicated it, rotated it, and moved it downward - 200 times in a 180° sweep. Painful if I did this manually, so I made a macro. Not fancy, but cheap. procedure Fetch; var i : integer; pX, pY, D, R : real; h : handle; begin pX := -1228.91; pY := 103.72; { Top view pipe centerline } R := 0.9; { Rotation angle } D := -0.0575; { Drop distance } for i := 1 to 200 do begin h := LSActLayer; Duplicate (0, 0); RotatePoint (pX, pY, R); h := LSActLayer; Move3DObj (h, 0, 0, D); end; end; run (Fetch); I then added the solids. Duplicating this solid, rotating it 180° and then subtracting the two solids from the tube gave the result I needed. Thanks for showing me some new methods of creating objects using tools that I wouldn't have thought of. It was a very challenging model.

No problem. Thankyou again.

The square edge one is exactly what I would like to do. How did you do it please ?

Hi, I need to mill out a curved slot like this. It's a vertical pipe with a hole drill horizontally and the milled horizontally down and around to the far side. I can make the nurbs curve, but I can't extrude it so that it can be subtracted from the pipe solid.

Excellent idea Tom. Thanks for the prompt Mark.

I like the Working Planes option. Thanks Tom.

This pink box sometimes pops up, but not always. I like to take snaps of things for emails and this topic. The only way I know of getting rid of it is to choose top plan view and back to this view and render again. Is there another way ??

Ok. Sorry to challenge you all when there was not challenge. The problem was the export settings. I'm still not sure why there is a difference between the VS pipe and the manually built pipe, but AutoCad only opens the drawing properly when the "Use DXF/DWG indexed colours" is picked (with or without the "Map line weights to colours").

This code work perfectly in VW, but after exporting the pipe to AutoCad, AutoCad shows this pipe on the left. The other two pipes, to the right, created manually with VW tools/menu options, work fine. Can anyone suggest what needs to be adjusted in the code to make the left look like the right please? The macro uses a line that is drawn to length and is selected at the time of running the code. GetPolylineVertex (h2, 2, p1X, p1Y, N, PipeR); h1 := ConvertToNurbs (h2, false); PipeLnth := HLength (h1); Oval (-PipeOD/2, PipeOD/2, PipeOD/2, -PipeOD/2); h2 := LNewObj; Oval (-PipeOD/2 + WallWdth, PipeOD/2 - WallWdth, PipeOD/2 - WallWdth, -PipeOD/2 + WallWdth); h3 := LNewObj; ClipSurface (h2, h3); h4 := PrevObj (h3); h5 := CreateCustomObject ('Extrude Along Path', 0, 0, 0); DelObject (h2); DelObject (h3); I have also tried "h5 := CreateCustomObjectPath ('Extrude Along Path', h1, h4);" which didn't change anything. In AutoCad, the left pipe is a "Block Reference", the right top is a "3D Solid", and the right bottom is a "Block Reference".

Nice one Tom. That workspace V is the only one missing from mine, so your probably right about the 2025 change which didn't happen for me since I have a revised copy of the workspace. Thanks.

I'm seeing that your suggestion works when I switch workspaces. I haven't reset the V button so I'm not sure how it attached itself to the Visibility tool. I will have to make a new workspace using a copy of the default. Thanks. The V does do what I was expecting by hovering over the Unhide button. Interesting.

To use the V key as you suggest, when you have hidden some objects, don't you then have to change your preferences to toggle the "Visible mode" ? Then when you hit the V key, that's when the ghosts appear. If you forget to change your preferences, then you have to select them after hitting the V key. I would still opt for a default hover over the unhide button to temporarily ghosting the hidden objects.

When objects are hidden, this button appears. It would be nice to hover over this button with the mouse and see a ghost outline of the hidden objects until the mouse is moved of the button. This default will be much easier than using the Visibility Tool and clicking on and off the options to do this.

It's been a while since asking this question. I'm guessing that VW can't do this, or no one else has a need to do this. However, if anyone else is hunting for an answer, I have a work around. Since you already know the file name you want to create, use ReWrite (DataFName); and Close (DataFName); to create a blank file or set of files ( I needed 5 exported worksheet PDF files ). Function ChangeLocalFileName (Prefix : string) : string; var FName : string; begin FName := Concat (Copy (GetFPathName, 1, Pos (GetFName, GetFPathName) - 1), Prefix, GetFName); FName := Concat (Copy (FName, 1, Pos ('.vwx', FName) - 1), '.pdf'); ChangeLocalFileName := FName; end; begin ReWrite (ChangeLocalFileName ('WORKSHEET1 ')); Close (ChangeLocalFileName ('WORKSHEET1 ')); end; Then, when Window's saving convention pops up, just click the appropriate file name created previously to overwrite it. It sure saves time and RSI.