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Sketching on curved surfaces

Sketching on curved surfaces

Ok i know this one must be very tricky but sketching on a non flat surface would be incredible !

 

I know you can project drawings and models on surfaces but it's time consuming when you have to redraw or modify things (for 3D models, you have to unlink everything after projection and its very hard even after unlinking to change anything).

51 Comments
Wrapping images just takes a simple coordinate transform and is a standard feature of 3D rendering engines. Basically just x2 = f(x1) sort of mapping. Very straightforward even if you're doing it for the first time.

Wrapping sketches properly requires differential geometry and there are probably a ton of hidden assumptions about flatness and Euclidian topology baked into the sketch engine that would have to be rethought.

Simple example: a straight line in a flat sketch can be represented by a position and direction. On a curved surface, that is still true but the line becomes a geodesic and if the curvature changes, the geodesic will depend sensitively on where exactly you pick that fixed starting point and direction. Try instead to use two points to define the line and while that uniquely defined a line in a Euclidian sketch, you now potentially have an infinite family of geodesics. Even doing that consistently on the surface of a sphere is tricky and doing it in a way that will seem reasonable and intuitive to the user on arbitrarily curved surfaces that can change geometrically and topologically is highly nontrivial. Try to kludge it with the same coordinate remapping from image mapping and lots of things will break and not work at all reasonably
Anonymous
Not applicable

I see. Thats very informative. Thanks. Smiley Happy

promm
Alumni

Draw Sketch on Surface.png

Image from merged idea

Anonymous
Not applicable

I can't find if this featue has been added  so I am assuming that it hasn't. i would like to chime in support for this feature when working with sketches. Right now, the best solution I have been working with has been to split the body with the sketch and then press pull. The problem is that split body extends all the way through the the design to the other surface(s), which is very undesirable. 

Anonymous
Not applicable
That, and when you split a body from a sketch it projects the sketch along
a single vector, instead of perpendicular to the surface that you want to
intersect. Useless if you're projecting to a tight cylindrical surface to
wrap around it for example. I think if you could use an SVG for a decal
and then push-pull from there, you'd have something. Not doable though.
Anonymous
Not applicable

The lack of being able to project a complex shape or sketch onto a surface is a deal breaker for me. Something like Rhino's flow to curve or flow to surface would have me back to fusion in a heartbeat.

scott.mayson
Contributor

A feature to draw splines etc directly onto surface and control edit handles so that the curve stays on surface would be fantastic. This feature exists in Solidthinking Inspire and is really useful.

Anonymous
Not applicable

What would be super helpful would be the ability to wrap a sketch onto a surface. E.g. to cut a specific cam slot into a cylinder. The ability to lay it out on a flat sketch makes getting the cam timing correct easy then if you could just wrap that onto the right sized cylinder and push/pull that curve right in!

Anonymous
Not applicable

Freehand/assisted from existing geo/grid sketching splines on curved surfaces would be so good. The current system is very time consuming:  with the difficulty of creating a construction plane in relation to a sphere or curved surface that's not sitting on an origin point/plane... well 3d surface sketching would just be amazing. Please include this in Fusion!

moth3r
Enthusiast

I really miss this functionality! It would also allow offsets/insets among other features which are currently incredible time consuming.

 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/quot-inset-quot-faces-selection-and-other-th...

Anonymous
Not applicable

I desperately need a tool that will accurately map and fit a flat pattern sketch, imported from Adobe Illustrator as a DXF file, onto the circumference of a cylinder and line up the seam where the ends of the sketch meet.  This is the type of advanced tool that would allow advanced modeling techniques.

 

 

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