A Few Curves

Dave Richards

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SE Minnesota





This was inspired by a piece by Robert Sukrachand. I'm thinking of doing a blog post on how I drew it. The piece looks like it could be quite complex to draw but it's not too bad.
 
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Wow, you have no idea how great of timing you have Dave. I was actually trying to figure out how to draw curved surfaces this week for doing some drawings for my cnc. :thumb:
 
I was able to figure out a good way to draw some contoured tool paths that will work last night using the Bezier Spline[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] tool. I was hoping to draw fewer bezier lines and let the curviloft generate some, but I couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the surface/skin and keep the underlying mesh framework.[/FONT]
 
How about this method?



Create the skin with Curviloft. It'll be a group. Explode it. turn on View>Hidden Geometry. Select all of it and right click on it. choose Smooth/Soften and run the slider to the left to unsoften the edges. Switch to Wireframe face style. Drag a selection box around the mesh and copy it to one side with the Move/Copy tool. Delete the original if you wish.
 
Awesome! I think that may work. Still have to do some deleting of the mesh lines either the X or Y axis and the angled ones between, but that still may be faster than the other method I was thinking.

I was planning to draw a grid for reference, then draw vertical lines (blue axis) for the thickness of my piece for that specific area of my part at each grid intersection, then connect the tops of my vertical lines using beziers across the red axis direction only to build my machine paths back and forth to cut out the contoured surface using a 1/4" bit.
 
I see what you're after. If you did do something like I made and wound up with too many diagonals, you could switch to Parallel Projection and set a standard view such as Front which would allow you to make narrow right to left selection boxes. Select the diagonals and hit Delete. This would also get rid of the crossing lines but leave you with a series of paths to create the shape.

If you use the verticals idea to draw the curves, don't use Bezier. Instead, use Catmull splines as I showed in my blog post with the wooden coat hanger. Then you can put the control points on the ends of the vertical lines.
 
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