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Hi Wayne,
(Wall-of-text follows)
It was really just a question of seeing whether there is any effort underway to allow access to an API version of the wrap to surface tool available inside 3D sketches - which you have said doesn't exist (yet?). ![]()
When I look at the manual way of doing it, I can see that the created 3D Sketch points are grouped into one feature which obviously updates should the source geometry change.
Thinking about it further, I would need to do similar in order to have my points update should the source information be updated. For the time being, I have the tool create a 2D sketch that contains the hole positions from a spreadsheet (see below) but there's no link between that any of the SketchPoint3D objects created after that so it could be misleading to the user.
The (manual) workflow this is required to replace is this:
- User has a cylindrical tube that requires lots (possibly 100s) of radial holes
- User creates a spreadsheet with X & Y hole positions, sizes and names like this:
- User creates a 2D sketch on a tangential workplane and imports data into it as a series of sketch points
- User creates a 3D Sketch and uses Wrap to surface command to create multiple SketchPoint3D objects
- User then creates workpoints at each SketchPoint3D <= one of the most time consuming parts as there is no "group select" available...?
- User creates Work axes normal to cylindrical surface using each workpoint location as a reference
- Finally, the User runs the "hole on point" feature to create a hole using the size information and name above
All-told, creating even 15 holes using the above workflow takes about ~30 minutes.
My initial implementation of the addin can do all of that in <=1 minute:
(There is a weird delay sometimes when opening the accompanying Excel file using Excel 2016 on my system, but that's a topic for another thread I think!)
I guess the instruction will be simply "If you need to update the holes after having run the addin, you will need to move the EOP marker, delete everything below and re-run" which of course would screw up any geometry created after the tool is run.
Unless of course you can show me how to link the wrapped SketchPoint3D objects to the Excel data or perhaps to the 2D sketch points I'm currently creating?
To counter this flaw I suppose I could split the functionality:
- Automate the point import to create the 2D Sketch & SketchPoints.
- Have the customer create a 3D Sketch and then use the built-in Wrap to surface function to create the SketchPoint3D objects linked to 1).
- Use the API's SelectionFilterEnum.kSketch3DPointFilter inside of the CommandManager.Pick() command to have the user create a collection of points based on 2) above.
- Take that collection of points and create at each location Workpoints, workaxes and holes the same as above video.
I guess there is no way of providing selectset(s) into the UI's existing tools? (I'm thinking the previously-selected cylindrical face and the newly created SketchPoints in the case of the Wrap-to-Surface command)
Thanks,
Alex.
Alex Fielder
Inventor Expert
https://github.com/alexfielder/
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