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Purpose:

This tutorial walks through a custom block used to determine the wall thicknesses of any implicit body. This custom block creates rays orthogonal to the build direction of the implicit body and parallel to a user-defined build plane (based on manufacturing orientation) and determines the lengths of the rays constrained to the walls of the implicit body.

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Applies to:

  • nTop 2.23.7+
  • Repeatable Workflows
  • Wall Thicknesses
  • Branched Lattices

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Input:

mceclip0.png The inputs for this block are:
  • The Implicit body
  • The build plane
  • The number of rays you wish to sample around the normal central axis of the build plane
  • The number of rays you wish to sample contained within the implicit body and parallel to the build direction
You may specify a tolerance when constraining the rays to the design space of the implicit body.

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Step 1:

mceclip1.png The first step is to create the rays orthogonal to the central axis of the build plane. Using line segments, the span length of the design space is extracted from the bounding box of the implicit body, and the positive x-axis coordinate serves as a starting point, while the negative x-axis coordinate serves as an endpoint. This creates one line segment, which is subsequently copied through a full 360-degree rotation about the build direction. The number of rays created equals the Vertical Sampling Count parameter defined in the input section.

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Step 2:

mceclip2.png The second step creates the rays which span the implicit body along the build direction. Using the new lattice pipeline, branched lattices are created from the line segments and are subsequently arrayed in the build direction to fill the entire design space. The number of lattice line segments created from the initial plane in Step 1 corresponds to the Circum. Sampling Count input parameter. These lattice rays are then trimmed to the walls of the implicit body as a lattice body.

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Step 3:mceclip3.png

The third and final step creates a point map from the trimmed lattice body in Step 2, by extracting the start and endpoints of the lattice beams and the lengths of these beams. The points are concatenated into one list, as are the lengths, such that the points can be mapped to the lengths extracted from the lattice body line segments. This point map then allows the user to determine the wall thickness of their implicit body at various locations of the design space.

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Keywords:

block thickness implicit body map thick workflow custom point beams wall orthogonal ray