Style feature and surfaces

Hello people,

I'm making your typical rectangular Style surface, creating boundary
curves as part of the Style feature. If you imagine a shape like half a
bottle cut down the middle, I have 2 planar curves corresponding to the
long sides of the surface, and I have created 3 free curves that snap
(with the Alt key) to the 2 planar curves. IOW their end points lie on
the same dtm that the planar curve are sketched on. This is the active
plane.

How do I give these 3 curves draft? I can make them normal to the
active plane, that's easy, but I would have thought to be drafted they
would have to be planar. How would you do that within a Style feature?

 

Couple ways:
1.. Make the curves planar: pick the curve with Curve Edit, click the Planar radio button and pick a plane; pick a curve and do Curve Edit, then pick an end point and do Tangent. Make sure the end point is set to Free, then you should able to set tangent length and angle.
2.. Give an angular value for the end point and pick the normal plane as a reference. The curve can be Free or Planar, but the end point must be free.

 

If I do this the only option I get is the question: "Convert the curve
from free to planar on the active datum plane?" If I pick Yes then it
flattens the curve to the active plane, which was normal to the curve
endpoints before. There are no other planes to pick, this active plane
is one of only 3 default datums. What I really need is a datum plane
normal to the afforementioned plane that goes through the 2 endpoints
of the curve, but you can't do this within the Style feature. I know
how I could do it in regular Surfacing but I'm trying to learn Style.

This doesn't work. The curve I want to modify is an internal curve: if
I make the endpoint tangent it goes tangent to the planar curve in the
other direction, i.e. the one the endpoint lies on.

How do I give an angular value for the endpoint? At the moment it's
normal, which means 90deg to the active plane. My other options are:
Natural, Free, Fix Angle, Horizontal, Align, Symmetric, Tangent,
Curvature, Surface Tangent, Surface Curvature, Disconnect. How can I
make a curve come out of a normal plane at an angle without a second
plane to determine its orientation?

 

Yes, I understand. You want a plane that's parallel to the curve that you want to
make planar, so it doesn't change orientation. But the main thing is, before you
change the curve from free to planar, before you even PICK the curve, change your
ACTIVE plane because whatever is active is where your curve will wind up when you
convert it to planar. So change the active plane first. Then pick the curve and
click the Planar radio button.

BTW, it's very likely that this is not the plane you wanted this curve on,
probably because it was not in the right place. That's why you can set an offset,
to push the curve away from the plane it was on. You could, of course, create some
datum planes ahead of time, at the intervals that you'd like to create sketched
curves, but it's not really necessary with the ability to offset from the active
plane.

Yes, you can, but you have to do it first. YOu have to make a plane active before
you try to convert your Free curve to a Planar one. Then set an offset value if
that's not really where you want it.

No, sorry, not what I meant. Tangent is used in several different places for
different purposes. The Tangent I'm referring to is a button in the slide up
panel, below the radio buttons. These options control the end points, or whichever
one you select. At the top, under Constraints, you selected to set an end point to
normal, but in that list are a bunch of different 'tangency' conditions. One is
Free. When you set the end point to this condition, it will let you also set an
angle and length, including something approximating a draft angle.

David Janes

 

There's no plane anywhere near the curve I'm trying to make planar.
Maybe in WF you can make a datum plane as part of the Style feature? I
should say at this point I am using 2001 Style :-^ I can do it the
old-fashioned way, make a datum plane through points on the planar
curves normal to the plane of the planar curves and do a second style
fetaure/planar curve on this plane and aligned to the points, but I may
as well forget using Style altogether.

But this would have to be a separate datum feature, made before the
Style, yes?

The 2001 menu is obviously different to WF. There is only one place
where I can pick "tangent" and it doesn't have the same result that you
seem to be able to get. I can key in an angle but the result isn't
predictable, and I don't see how it can be. How can you give a curve
rising up out of an (active) plane an angle? It needs 2 if it's a free
curve.

Anyway...I have managed to get the curves drafted by making 2 style
features: by making the long planar curves in the 1st Style, then
adding some ribbon surfaces, then making a second style feature with
the "hoop" curves with surface tangency at the endpoints, tangent to
the ribbon surfaces.

Now, I can't seem to make the Style surface itself have tangent
boundaries. It's drafted through the curves but elsewhere when I do a
draft check it veers away from the draft angle. A regular boundary
surface could be made tangent to the ribbon surfaces but there's no
option with the Style surface.