Help!

[shift1313]

The PM system can be used by clicking on a users name(shift1313). A drop down menu will show up and "Send User a PM" will be a choice. The top right of your screen should have your user name, date of last visit and if you have any new PMs when you open the cadtutor.net/forum page.

 

I will try to take a look at your file some time today and get back to you.

 

On the subject of redoing the work planes it depends on how you drew the rest of your file and what you referenced for your dimensions. If you right click on a sketch name in your feature tree you can redefine the plane on which it was drawn but this could be a dangerous endevor depending on your approach to the model.

 

 

 

JD, i think that would be a much better approach and students would certainly learn a lot more that way. With the few people I have been helping out I try to make sure I point out several methods and make them understand the tools available and why/how they work rather than just saying "click here, enter this, do that"

[shift1313]

Hey anna, i finally got to the file. Right off hand i dont see an easy way to move your sketchs around to line up with the origin as in the file. What i did was create another plane. You could have to remove some geometry/constraints that are to the origin in your original sketch. If your sketch was perfect you could go(while in a sketch) up to Tools>Blocks>make. Then you could make your sketch a block, save this, then insert this into a new sketch adding a constraint with the point on your reference line and the origin.

 

BUT, i think your splines in Sketch1 need a little more work or you will have issues later in the tutorial(im assuming, i havent gone through it). The image attached is a zoom in of your upper spline. What i did was remove the horizontal and coincident constraint with the point(red arrow) and adjusted the handles to smooth the curve out. This is one thing that bothered me with the begining of this tutorial, they have you add many spline points, but that makes for some bad geometry so you have to be real careful with this. As a note you can see in most of their images some dashed grey lines and points outside of the spline. This would be how you control a b-spline. If you right click on your spline(in a sketch) and select Display Control Polygon you will see this.

 

I went through the next couple steps of the tutorial just to see how you would progress with it and i think you need to go back and edit your first sketch. These first several sketches are used to create a spine of sorts to build a skeleton model for making these surfaces. So basically all of these sketches on different planes need to pierece others at certain points in order for this method to work. You can see in the next couple images i uploaded that this already causes a problem.

 

This is where the tutorial lacks in giving you the "why", and only giving you the "how" but you dont know what you are trying to achieve. Sketch5 needs to be edited. It needs to intersect your first projected curve(curve1) in order to connect the first curve with this new intersected curve.

 

Take a look at the few things i mentioned and hopefully it gets you on your way just a little bit more.

[shift1313]

I thought i would mention one more thing. On page 13 they make you start a 3d sketch so you can convert and trim your Curve1 to use as a boundary surface. This isnt neccessary to do. When you create a boundary surface and you are selecting your first curves(direction1) they will have endpoints(green and pink dots), you can grab these dots and drag them around the curve to only use part of it. After you have selected your second curve, grab the endpoint of curve1 and drag it so they snap together. The image below was dont this way, you can see the green dot in the bottom left where the curves intersect.