Transcript
Transcript
In this lesson, we will walk through how to orient bodies onto a surface. So, in the starter file, we have our part. We have the one body as a CAD body variable. We converted it to an implicit body, and we’ll need that for any Boolean operations we do, as well as those two surfaces that we want that texture, as well as a mesh version of that. So currently, these are two faces, but when we stitch these CAD faces together, we will get one mesh. That mesh from CAD body and we can also remesh the surface if we want so that we have that more uniform mesh, and we can control that edge length as well.So I’ll add a new section, and this will be where we do our work. So I’ll just label this Orient object and minimize some of those inputs. The first thing that I’ll do is pick the location that we’re going to add our body to. So I’m going to use our Random Points on a Mesh where our mesh will be this meshed surface, and let’s just have 200 points. So anywhere we see these points on this mesh surface, that is where our texture, our body that we’re orienting is going to go. So right-click, make this a variable, and label this points. You can see what that looks like on our implicit body that we’ll Boolean things to later.So then the next step is what do we want our texture to be? So for this example, we’re going to have this hex design, this hex unit cell that we’ll place on each one of these points. So you could also bring in, you know, a design that you made in CAD. You have a mesh design that you already have, you could import those and start right away. But I’m just going to create something within nTop that we’ll use, and I’m going to use some of our options in our Modeling tab for this.Extrude profile. The profile that I’ll use, I want this hex design. So I’m going to use our Regular Polygon Block Plane. It can be any starting plane. I’ll just type in plane from normal sides. I want six, and for the radius, I’ll use 20 mm. So if I type I, and I can type Z to have this centered, we can see this is just that polygon, currently has no thickness. So I’m just going to extrude through that profile. I’ll make the distance 10 mm, and I’ll do this in the direction of 0 0 1. So if I turn on that visibility, we can see it’s just going up from that surface.And I could use this implicit body and orient it on each one of these parts, but it’ll actually be faster if we first convert this to a mesh. This is a simple design, and I’ll point out later how making this a mesh now will save us some time later on. So I’ll use our Mesh from Implicit Body block, which I could search for, or I could just click on that and do a context search for that mesh from implicit body. I’ll do a tolerance of one, and I’ll sharpen this and also simplify it so you can see it. We’ll have a lot of triangles. It has about 90% simplification, and I’ll right-click and make this a variable, which I’ll label units.So another way you can also create these kinds of designs is using our periodic lattices, having your own custom implicit unit cell, and placing that on here. So this is just another way that you can create that type of texture as well with these set of points. And the way to do that is using our Orient Object block. So the object I want to orient is unit cell, and the way this Orient object works is we have a source plane and then where we want this to go, that destination plane. So I’ll start with the plane from normal. Let’s go back to just viewing our unit cell.And this is at that bottom surface of our unit cell. So if I wanted to ensure that everything is flushed to the surface, maybe I only want this to actually come out 5 mm, but I want this to be placed right at that centroid. So it’s 5 mm into our surface, 5 mm out to the surface. Then what I could do is go into our block details for our unit cell, into properties, into that bounding box, and choose that centroid as our origin for that source plane. And where I’m going to place this, I’ll place in another plane from normal, and you can see it’s just going to place this new object that’s been moved right wherever that plane is. So if I move this plane over, it’s going to be placed in the same way that the source plane was for our unit cell, so right at that centroid. So you could also play around with different locations that you want that origin to be, or even that normal to rotate that as well.But I want this to be at all of our points, so I can just drag and drop my points, and if I zoom out, everywhere that I have those points, we can see I now have that unit cell. And if I turn on my destination plane, so a lot of planes we have here, and the normal is all 0 0 1. So while it was placed in all of those points, we don’t have it so it is oriented normal to the surface, which is what I want to create that texture. So there’s a couple ways to go about it. So one thing we can do is use our Closest Point to Body. So if you were unsure if the points were exactly on that surface, you could always bring in the points, bring in that original body for the body. This will place them right onto that body. The other nice thing about this block is we also have the normal of that surface. So we could take this normal, we could take those points, and that would be our origin and our normal.Another way to go about this if you are fine with that location of those points is to use our Evaluate Field Gradient. So what this will do is take in a scalar field, or you could take in an implicit body like our original body, and place in our points, and it’s going to give us this normal vector. So we can see these are the different vectors for each one of these points, and that’s also going to give us the vector that’s normal to that surface. So I’ll put this right in here, turn on the destination plane, and now we can see that instead of them all having that 001, that we have our normal, which is those blue lines. If we look at our original body, that is going to be normal to our surface there. So when we look at our Orient object, which is now placing each of these unit cells right at that center of our plane, we are going to have it so that it is normal to the surface like so.Now these are 200 different hexagonal designs here, that unit cell. So I’m going to do to make this one, and then Union this to our original body is first merge these meshes. So I already have a list, so I’ll delete this mesh list, bring in that Orient object, and now instead of having 200, I have just one mesh. So even though they are not connected, I still I’m thinking of them as one mesh, similar to that Stitch Adjacent CAD Faces. I’m going to get that one mesh. So I’ll right-click and make this a variable and label this oriented X.And with our Orient object, we could have brought in an implicit, and it would have done the same thing, but we couldn’t have done this quick merge meshes to get that one body. We would have had to bring in the Orient object into a Boolean Union, and when we have a couple items to Union, it’s nice, quick, and easy. However, when we have something like 200 or a lot more than that, we are going to see that the Boolean Union will take a little while to run. So by doing this mesh version, such a simple part to mesh, it would be nice, quick, and easy. We had that merge meshes, and then what we can do is our Implicit Body from Mesh, bring in that merge meshes, and now it’s pretty quick to convert that all to an implicit without having to do that Boolean Union. We have just one. So I’ll bring that in to our Boolean Union, bring that to the last item in my notebook, and the last thing I’ll do is just Union this to my original body. So when I type I to show this Boolean Union, we have our texture now all throughout those surfaces that we wanted. So I’ll right-click, make this a variable, and label this our hex texture, and we’ve now oriented this body that we wanted onto the surface to create this type of texture.