Need help making a shower base

[wquinton]

Were looking at manufacturing shower bases on our cnc and having trouble design this in fusion 360 Were trying to slope to the drain. We need outside edge to remain the designated height and slope to a hole that is on the far right 

[etfrench]

One way is to use the loft tool.  In one sketch, draw the perimeter of the shower floor.  In a second sketch, draw the drain hole.  The distance between the sketch locations should equal the slope.  Loft between the two sketches.

[gatzkerob]

I'm also trying to do this. Would you mind providing more details on your answer?

[etfrench]

Here you go:

Screencast will be displayed here after you click Post.

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Notes:

I just picked a random position for the drain.  You should use dimensions to position it accurately.

All of the dimensions including the depth of the drain can be edited in the Change Parameters dialog.

p.s. I left the Shell operation out of the screencast.  You'll need to do this in order to get the sloped floor.

[houdi84]

Did anyone get this to work in the end? I'm trying to do something similar and it's proving impossible to do.

[jhackney1972]

Have no idea what the model looks like.  The Screencast is missing from the post.  Please post a screen capture of a similar part.

[houdi84]

I'm trying to add a sloped floor to the drain hole 3mm at most above the existing floor. I can draw it using surface loft but Boundary Fill leaves loads of gaps it seems. When I send it to BambooStudio to slice it raises an error to the effect that it's not a solid object.
I can reverse the panels to change from yellow to gray but that's just an illusion - still won't 3d print.

[jhackney1972]

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@houdi84 wrote:

I'm trying to add a sloped floor to the drain hole 3mm at most above the existing floor. 

Your statement makes no sense, I believe you want the drain hole to be "below" the existing floor with the floor slopped to the drain.  Also you say you want from the top of the floor to slope, I assume down, by a 3 mm drop.  This is not possible since your floor is only 2 mm thick.  I assume you do not what to build extra thickness in the floor but you will have to answer that.  I had to add small radii in the corners as the Loft command will not work on a sharp corner.

When you get your design specifications straight and still need help, please ask.

Model attached to my specifications.

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[TheCADWhisperer]

@houdi84 

Do you want planar slopes or curved slopes?

[houdi84]

Either are acceptable.
I can get the surface loft to provide the falling slope but it seems the issue is filling the void beneath it using Boundary Fill. The yellow I'm seeing is, according to the built in Assistant, caused by a reversal of negative and positive sides. I swapped them as it said and the yellow disappears but the BambuStudio slicer still throws an error as it's not a solid object to print.

I may have to abandon the idea of a slope using loft and try a different approach of using four sketches, one per side panel, and extrude out from each to the hole - I just need a working solution to allow me to progress. I thought Loft was the perfect way to do it but clearly I'm just not doing it correctly.

[jlarsonLP454]

Boundary fill should not be needed here. Did you say something about surfacing? I wouldn't use any surfacing commands for this - do everything in the SOLID tab. Draw your shower bounding box, shell it so it has a flat floor, use the Construct/Offset Plane command to make a plane at the correct depth for the drain, and sketch in your drain circle on that plane. Use a loft command to cut from the flat floor down to your drain circle sketch. Looks like some other people may be working on a demo screencast for you, but I can make one if needed

[houdi84]

Sounds interesting. You'll have to forgive me as I'm new to this and don't have a CAD background (I'm a retired software engineer) so trip up on the terminology.
When you refer to a bounding box is that a specific tool or simply refers to the box I've already created with the drain hole in it? There already is a plane at the level of the drain but my thinking was to create another plane 3mm above it which I'd use with Loft to join the two together and result in a slope.
The issue I was having with solid loft rather than surface loft was that I couldn't select anything for it to use. I'd tried projecting where the box wall intersected with the plane but still couldn't select it. I then tried drawing an extra line on that plane's sketch in an attempt to use that but still couldn't select it.
I think I've got a fundamental misunderstanding of how Loft is intended to be used in this scenario. 

[TheCADWhisperer]

@houdi84 

One example attached.

Step through the Timeline.

I would do slightly differently if planar faces on floor desired.

[TheCADWhisperer]

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@jlarsonLP454 wrote:

...but I can make one if needed

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Please do.

[houdi84]

That Sir looks perfect.
If you could at some point please explain what I'd have to do to recreate it so I can learn from it that would be fabulous.
Many thanks.

[jlarsonLP454]

Here you go! Hope this helps. File also attached for reference

[jlarsonLP454]

Looks like TheCADWhisperer and I used slightly different methods but both would get you there. The one thing I didn't do in my example is to adjust the floor thickness after cutting a portion of it away. If you use the shell command like I did then the floor will be the same thickness as the walls initially, and adding the slope may make it too thin. The easy way to fix this is to use the MODIFY/ PRESS/PULL command, grab the bottom face of the floor (or the top face BEFORE sloping it) and pulling it whatever distance is needed to get the thickness you want. 

[houdi84]

You make it look very straightforward, thanks. I'll try to apply the techniques to my design tomorrow (it's the evening here). The only thing confusing me is adding the plane at the base and using that with the drain. With mine I extruded up from the plane and then put a hole in it. Perhaps I should've extruded higher to in effect include the floor thickness plus 3mm for the slope, then used Loft to cut it backdown to the floor level - I'll try that tomorrow.

Thanks for your time, it's very much appreciated.

[houdi84]

Have spent the morning trying to replicate this approach but without success. When I change the action in the Loft from Join to Cut it flashes an error saying "No target body found to cut or intersect!".

Update: I've no idea why but it's suddenly started working. I noticed this time that it was automatically choosing 'cut' rather than me having to do it so clearly I'm doing something subtly different to the previous umpteen attempts to replicate your workflow.

Further update: Think I've spotted my error. When selecting the drain circle I was clicking it's outer ring rather than the dot in it's centre. (leaving this here for the next poor bugger that has to wrestle with this lol).

Thanks again.

[jlarsonLP454]

Glad you got it working, but I am a bit confused by why it wasn't working. In my example I clicked on the circle outer ring and it worked fine. I just played with it and it also works if I click on the point, but the resulting geometry is slightly different as I would expect since it's lofting to the center point rather than the circle. Either way works fine for what you're doing. 

That error indicates there's no material for it to cut - either because you're lofting in open space rather than through previously created 3D geometry, or because your part isn't visible in the viewport (if you turn off part or body visibility during these commands it ignore that part/body and will give that error). If you want to investigate further feel free to share your file (right click on the component name in the browser and export as a .F3D Fusion File) and/or a screencast (I use the free OBS Studio program).