FC v0.17dev: Part Design Next Usecases and Best practices

[DeepSOIC]

It was quite hard to achieve before: corner of a cube.

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box-corner.FCStd

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How to:
1. PartDesign New part, New Body
2. Additive box. Just click OK.
3. Datum plane. Use 'Plane by 3 points' attachment mode. The plane should slice off the wanted piece from the cube.
4. Create a sketch on the plane, draw a big rectangle...
5. ...and Pocket away the unneeded part of Box. Done

[cox]

It was quite hard to achieve before: corner of a cube.

True, Thanks for the contribution

[DeepSOIC]

By the way! What is this topic doing in Dev's corner? I think it should be moved to Help forum, and made sticky for a while Should I do it?

[Sawfish]

Good idea, because it will probably take some time before the wiki is updated with 0.17, and there is also the question how the wiki should be organised supporting two different part workbenches.

Best regards
ZF

[cox]

Sure, good idea.

The reason I put it in Dev. corner was to not draw to much attention or rather differentiate between Stable and development. It is a rather big change after all.

[cox]

Groove on cylinder top

I guess one would either use support geometry or fuse one cylinder and a part:Design:Revolve in 0.16 PartDesign.

Parametric: You can change all cylinder properties, The groove is centred on the slope with a 1/4 slope length radius.

While playing with this I lost visibility of the construction plane, it would not toggle back to visible until i restarted FreeCAD.

I also discovered som strange behaviour while editing the sketch, While being in edit mode the auto-constraints suggested while drawing a horizontal line was vertical and visa versa. This switch also applied to manual constraints I made. If I applied a vertical constraint it became horizontal.

Will monitor for this behaviour and see if I can replicate.

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[cox]

Pad and Pocket directly from a face.

This can be a huge time-saver, and the workflow is intuitive. It will probably take me some time to relearn this, as the sketch first approach has been etched in my brain.

Simply select a face and choose Pad or Pocket tool.

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[NormandC]

Awesome find, cox.

I think it would be useful to be able to change the base face once the feature has been created.

One another thing I noticed: PD needs a refine shape feature. Using the one from the OpenSCAD workbench removes the feature from the Body and puts the refine feature at the same level as the body. So two more feature requests right there.

[cox]

I would like to credit the people involved in creating Part Design Next in the first post of this thread. A glaring omission on my part
@ickby, could you please list your partners in crime for me, so that I do not forget anybody.

[NormandC]

+1 !!!