Emboss with wrap to sphere?

[Bishop]

So I've got a quick little side-gig that's turning out to be not quite so quick as I'd have otherwise liked, for the amount that I'm getting paid for it. I have to emboss some text into a sphere, and it's starting to get annoying.

Obviously, I can't just use the emboss --> wrap to face tool, so what I think I'm going to have to do is this:

1. Set up a work plane (for each letter) at the correct position / orientation tangent to the sphere

2. Draw my letters in a 2-d sketch on those planes

3. Create a 3D sketch, include the geometry from the letters (probably one at a time)

4. Project to surface, with the face of the sphere selected, and the 'nearest' option picked.



From there I'm not sure yet if I want / need to use the projected curves as a path to sweep a profile to cut the edge of the letters, or if I need to try and do some complicated extrude surface with a taper, and then derive into a new part or something to cut the letters out.

Any suggestions?

[rdharvey]

wHY CAN'T YOU USE EMBOSS?

[JD Mather]

Because Emboss doesn't have an option to wrap to sphere.
But what you can do is wrap to a cylinder and intersect with sphere.
Because the text height is only a small fraction of the word length the slight distortion might not be a significant difference.
Attach your file here if you can't figure it out.

[Bishop]

Well, this turned out to be both easier and more annoying than expected.

Step 1 - Create sketch block of logo text, letter by letter. (I have a couple more objects to do, using the same logo.)

Step 2 - Create sphere of appropriate diameter to be the bottom of the cut letters. (My finished sphere is 3-3/4 with 1/16 deep letters, so this was 3-11/16 diameter.)

Step 3 - On X-Z plane, project cut geometry, lay out rays from center with work points and ... anyway, they're guides for work planes that will be the centerlines of the actual letters.

Step 4 - Project a work plane up from the X-Z plane 1/8 inch. This is where the bottoms of the letters will be. Project cut geometry.

Step 5 - On each one of the centerline planes, project the X and Y axes and the letter bottom guide. Lay out a line from the center of the sphere to the outside of the sphere. This is the absolute center point of each letter.

Step 6 - Put a work point on each centerline, where it leaves the sphere, then put a work plane on that point and tangent to the surface of the sphere.

Step 7 - New sketch again on the letter plane. Project Y axis, project the guide for the bottom of the letter. (This shows up as an ellipse)

Step 8 - Drop the letter sketch block onto the plane. Center it up on the origin of the work plane, and use the Y axis and the bottom guide to align it.

Step 9 - Midplane extrusion. Put in whatever draft you feel is appropriate. In this case, I used +2 out / -2 in. You should now have a letter raised from the surface of the sphere with a flat outer surface.

Step 10- Revolve, cut away the sphere. You're left now with just the letter(s), with a spherical inner surface.

Step 11- New Assembly, mating the text to a sphere of finished diameter.

Step 12- Derive into a new part, subtracting the letters from the sphere.

[JD Mather]

This sounds like wayyy too much work.
Attach the results here.

[Bishop]

Can't attach, really. This is the master for a mold for a proprietary object. I'll see if I can whip up something that approximates it, though ...

[Bishop]

Okay, had a few minutes to throw something together. This will show more or less my workflow with embossing to a sphere. In this example, I just used geometry text, so that doesn't require quite so much work at creating and aligning the text itself. (The company logo that I used for the actual item was not an off-the-shelf font, so I had to create the letters.)

Parts in the attached .ZIP file have the EOP dragged all the way up. Just push it back to the end if you want to look at everything. You'll have to do it on all three part files, then update the derive in FINAL PART.IPT.

[JD Mather]

I don't understand why you are doing so much work.
Offset sphere face as surface body desired distance into the sphere.
Extrude Cut to the surface body.

[JD Mather]

and...
in the Cutting Die (which I don't know why you need this) Why is Workplane 1 and Sketch3 and WorkPoint1 needed?
Looks to me like exactly the same thing could be done creating ONLY Sketch4

[Bishop]

I don't understand why you are doing so much work.
Offset sphere face as surface body desired distance into the sphere.
Extrude Cut to the surface body.

To be perfectly honest, though, I never even thought of trying it this time, probably because I never have much luck with using spherical faces as terminators for extrusion operations. For some reason, the opposite side of the sphere from what I wanted is always where things end up.

and...
in the Cutting Die (which I don't know why you need this) Why is Workplane 1 and Sketch3 and WorkPoint1 needed?
Looks to me like exactly the same thing could be done creating ONLY Sketch4

Workpoint 1 is needed because, for some reason, I can't select the sketch point to create the tangent plane. (I suppose I could have just done a plane on the sketch point perpendicular to the axis, since the point was tangent to the sphere, but ... meh. I lose points for style there. )

Work plane 1 and sketch 3 were actually used in some other parts of the original application for some other alignment stuff. They are extra here, but I put them in anyway because I wasn't really thinking far enough ahead about how much / how little effort I was going to put into the example part.