Hello.. trying to build a reducing elbow w/5mm thick walls

sconeman

Hello all, glad to have found this forum I've actually watched all the tutorials and I've downloaded skin.rb as well as pipe along path to try to make this happen.

I'm trying to build a reducing elbow with a 5mm thick wall and a small elbow. Seems I've chosen a difficult first project.

Problems I'm running into are extruding a second (outer layer): seems to not like doing a second extruded layer over a center extrusion around a bend.

Other problem is getting skin.rb to skin multiple circles together at the end of the pipe where I'm trying to reduce the elbow. I can do the first two of three cirles but the 3rd one won't connect. Seems like the problem is there are two many surfaces on the prior skinned surface...

any advice would be greatly appreciated as I've spent 3 nights so far trying to make this thing.

Cheers and thank you!

numbthumb

Hi, sconeman,
Have you tried this ? http://www.3skeng.com/en/products.htm

mitcorb

Yes, I would have suggested skeng for pipes too.

If you decide not to use skeng, and without an image of your project here to review, I would suggest this:

A reducing elbow will be bilaterally symmetrical. Therefore you could model half of it and mirror component the other half.
Based on the frustrations I have had with scale, you may run into mesh problems if you are trying to model this at real scale. The 5mm ought to start out at 500mm, because some of the operations I am going to suggest do not tolerate resultant small polys.
I would recommend Fredo's JointPushPull for the pipe wall, if you don't construct a 5mm profile face and extrude it along a preset path and then scale down with FredoScale, perhaps in a progressive step by step method.

Back to the scale thing. If you model at 100x reality, or some other gigantic factor and then scale down, the tiny triangles without faces don't happen so much.

TIG

Gaieus

Or use the TaperMaker plugin

Here can go any shape

sconeman

wow thank you for all the great suggestions. this is where I'm at

The things I'm having problems with now are:

I can't delete the small protrusion of pipe inside the large elbow. I've selected the two items and intersected them but no luck. I've tried every way I can think of to do this so I'd love some suggestions : )

I can't see an inner wall on the small pipe even though the dimensions are there. I went through these steps to make it.

-I drew a guide line on the axis I wanted.
-Drew a line long enough to have the pipe penetrate the large elbow.
-Drew two circles on the plane perpendicular to the line
-highlighted the line and extruded the inner circle
-intersected the inner wall and the large elbow then deleted the section of the large elbow that blocked the hole where the two intersected
-selected the 5mm shape in-between the two circles and extruded it.

then the inner wall dissapears.. plus i can't delete the lower section that protrudes into the elbow no matter how I intersect the peices...

Gaieus

It might be the very tiny scales you are working in. SU tends not to create faces that would have as small edges as about 1 mm. Try to scale your whole drawing up by 10 (or even 100), create these intersections and extrusions and when ready, scale everything back.