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How to trim edges of sheet materials with thickness - tidily


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I'm often coming up against situations like this:

 

1512850632_ScreenShot2019-04-29at15_33_00.thumb.jpg.00fe654f93b6a724053e000a055e1c18.jpg

 

In this example, sheet materials applied to the surface of two walls and a ceiling. They intersect because I've generated them from some reference geometry and then offset or moved them to their correct locations. NB that the two walls are at right angles to each other, but the ceiling is on a slope.

 

These can be trimmed back quite easily to something like this (I've just used the push pull tool):

 

1034639021_ScreenShot2019-04-29at15_34_53.thumb.jpg.60243ef48b44dfafa8805b761db734f1.jpg1262142499_ScreenShot2019-04-29at15_35_08.thumb.jpg.6f2410ec563059fe40bd71aafa613b5b.jpg

 

Which is OK but not quite what I want.

 

The question is how to trim back these sheets so that their edges meet tidily. That's easy with the two walls at right angles to each other - but not where they meet the ceiling. This is largely because the edge faces of each sheet are perpendicular to the main faces, but really those edge faces want to be on plane with whatever other sheet surface they are meeting.

 

So the edges of the 'ceiling' piece should be on plane with the outer faces of the 'wall' pieces, not tilted slightly outwards. And the top edges of the 'wall' pieces should be shaped to meet the underside of the 'ceiling' without gaps or overlaps.

 

My solution to these situations so far is:

(a) not bother about it, and leave it looking slightly messy on drawings,

(b) trim the edges to the right shape using a very long-winded process of solid subtractions, which often ends up with solid objects that then don't like being edited further.

 

Are there better ways of dealing with these kinds of situations?

 

(I've attached the example drawing file below)

 

VWtrim.vwx

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Orthogonal Views and the 3rd Mode of the Split (Slice) tool will be your friend here.

 

Add Solids then:

View in Front View - Slice away the excess from the right side

View in Right View - Slice away the excess from the front

Shift 1 - Set up a Working Plane on the Ceiling

View In Working Plane Front - Slice away the excess from the walls/ceiling plane.

Working Plane To Split.png

Edited by bcd
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18 hours ago, bcd said:

Orthogonal Views and the 3rd Mode of the Split (Slice) tool will be your friend here.

 

Add Solids then:

View in Front View - Slice away the excess from the right side

View in Right View - Slice away the excess from the front

Shift 1 - Set up a Working Plane on the Ceiling

View In Working Plane Front - Slice away the excess from the walls/ceiling plane.

Working Plane To Split.png

 

Amazing - thank you! This will save me a lot of time in the future.

I've never really made use of the split tool, and you also prompted me to fiddle around with working plane views, which I've also not really exploited much before.

 

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I only started using that tool at the end of last year, after about 12 years of not knowing!! It's really handy.

Remember, you can double click into the resulting geometry to change the split plane, or ungroup and re-split to change. It's a super-quick mitre tool.

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