I purchased a 3DConnexion device, which is nice, but I still need a keyboard and a mouse, so I don't really use the 3DConnexion much. I have a Wacom tablet, but while it has 3 mouse buttons, it lacks the wheel, so I cannot do everything I can with a mouse. My ideal input device would be a wireless Wacom tablet with support for multiple programmable buttons, but I do not think that such a thing exists (or, if it does, at a reasonable price). Attempting to locate such a device on the Wacom web site was a waste of time: all flash and useless content (no way to search for a feature).

What are people using for wireless non-keyboard input devices?

Elisei:

Thanks for the tips. I loaded some of Fredo's plugins and have played with them. They may well do the trick, although they appear to be flexible enough that they may not enforce non-compound curves in the surfaces. Still, a treasure trove of features.

Jeff:

I've used Rhino (years ago) and found the UI to be frustrating. And it is expensive. But if it does what we need to do...

Jon

I have a sculptor friend who creates large (10') sculptures out of sheet stainless steel. He can put the surfaces through a roller to bend them in one dimension, but he cannot create surfaces with compound curves (concavities and convexities) in the surfaces. He has some design software (Touch CAD) which he thought would produce solids with surfaces that are not compound, but that turns out not to be true.

The kinds of shapes he creates look a bit like taking a rectangle, pulling it up, rotating the top, translating the top, and then tilting the top. In Sketchup, this results in sides that are made of 2 triangles.I have attached a photo of one of his sculptures after being printed with my 3D printer

One way to ensure that he can fabricate his designs from sheet stainless would be to replace the curved surfaces with a series of straight lines. Best might be lines that are orthogonal to the edges, but even having the lines horizontal would be helpful. If the surface were concave, this would be a bit like using spackle to fill in the concavity, leaving a flatter surface.

Would it be possible (easy?!?) to write a Sketchup plugin that would "fix" his concavities?

Are there Sketchup plugins that would help him do his designs directly in Sketchup?

I have a DC which is a sub-component in a larger DC. When I alter the Z of the sub-component, it moves in X; when I alter the Y of the sub-component, it moves in X. I tried moving the axes to ensure that they were locked to the sub-component and properly oriented, but that did not help (or I did not succeed). Puzzled and frustrated.

There are two dimensions for a component: that which is visible on the screen (Type A), and that which Sketchup displays when you click the component (Type B). Sometimes the latter is significantly larger than the former.

I start out with a dynamic component that is, say, a cube. After I use it for a while, the Type B volume increases with empty space. My equations in the DC assumed that the two dimensions (Types A and B) would be the same, so the DC stops functioning properly.

Can anyone explain to me how to manage the Type B dimensions of the component?

Thanks!

I have created a set of dynamic components which behave as follows:

• left and right sides always form semi-circles
• central section always joins the two semi-circles, taking up whatever space remains

So far, so good. What I'm finding is that as I scale things, I also want to control the thickness of the three parts, so that larger parts are thicker than smaller parts. Is there any way to do this?

I created four DCs and then put them all in an enclosing DC. I then copied one of the internal DCs, made it unique, modified it, and put it also into the enclosing DC.

Under Component Attributes, I now have two DCs with the same name; under Entity Information, the two have different Definition Names. Under Entity Information, the two DCs have the same Name.

Is there any way to rename one of two DCs that currently have the same name? This is causing all sorts of havoc!

Jon

I want to create a DC which consists of four sub DCs: a left half semi-circular extrusion, a right half semi-circular extrusion, a central connecting part (consisting of two dis-connected extrusions), and an internal protrusion. You can see my first cut at this in the image.

I know that I can wrap another DC around these 4, and control the positions and sizes of each of the 4 via the 6 standard attributes for each of the sub DCs; and I can simplify this by introducing non-standard attributes (such as "height") which I can then assign to each of the sub DCs as appropriate (ZLen for the first 3 of the DCs).

As I change the sizes of the DCs, how do I ensure that they stay stuck together? Do I have to do this via complex arithmetic? If I make the connector shorter, I want the sides/ends to stay connected to the central part.

How can I "connect" the protrusion to the left side, given that the inside of the side is curved, and the left edge of the protrusion is flat? I would usually perform an Intersection or a Solid Union, but how do I accomplish this dynamically within the DC?

Jon

I tried Gilles approach, and when I got to step 11, the two parts did not line up. I modified the component by re-rotating the top until it looked OK, but I doubt that I got it spot on. The resulting torus looks nice, but is not solid at all. Boy, those explode and group steps take 10-15 minutes!

I was also not sure exactly how I was to do the smoothing in step 12.

Jeff: curviloft made quick work of joining the ends of the pipe together (thanks!), but the resulting group is still not noted as being solid (it just says "Group (1 in model)"). Ironically, I already had curviloft, but I have so many tools that I can't keep track of which to use when!

Thanks for all of the help!

@jean lemire said:

Hi Jon, hi folks.

See this SU file for ideas.

Jean: this is what I attempted to do, but I was unable to close up the helix successfully.

Jon

I created this in what I assume is the normal fashion: started with a torus, drew a line that wrapped around the torus twice, removed one line segment, created a surface orthogonal to the line end, drew a circle, and used a follow-me to create the "pipe". I then attempted to stitch the ends of that pipe together with a series of manually drawn lines to create triangles. I gather that this attempt failed. The original instructions said to use Skin to stitch the pipe together, but I could not get that to work at all.

So, I cannot see how to fix this helix. And I gather that the original torus also has a defect, but I've not had a chance to tend to that.

Again, any hints would be appreciated.

Jon

James Torus 1b2.skp

Well, I guess that neither the torus nor the helices are "solid", because it refuses to process any of them. They sure look solid to me. Is there a way to tell where the "defects" are so that I can make them solid?

@d12dozr said:

If the torus is a solid, and each of the helices are solid, you can use the Outer Shell tool (Tools > Outer Shell) to combine them into one solid. You may have to scale up the model by 1000x first so that all the little faces are formed.

I have been drawing a torus (group) on which I have added some helices (groups). It will be easiest if you look at the screen shot. The red one is a single helix (which wraps around twice); the others are similar helices.

This looks nice, but I want to 3D print it, and the helices (cylinders) are half inside and half outside the torus, so making the whole thing manifold is very complex (at least when done manually). I have tried to "fix" the thing using mesh tools, but that has failed.

A better approach might be to somehow lay lines on the surface of the torus and then raise the surface of the torus along the lines. Note that the original lines that I laid down to make the helices did not lie entirely on the surface of the torus, which could make this difficult, too.

I need some other approaches to doing this, since what I've tried has not worked very well. Any inspirations out there?

Jon