wind coil on square form

[Anonymous]

Hi-

I'm looking to show a coil of copper wire wound around a rectangular form with radiused corners. So far I just have the outline I want the winding to look like (except the radius is too big). the real coil would be several hundred turns with stacked layers of wire, but I'd be ok with just the outside layer looking like the coil. Any ideas?

Thanks, Greg

[jeff_strater]

Personally, I would not try to model this.  You could do it, but it would be pretty slow, even for the outer-most layer of wire.

I would be tempted to just use an appearance.  Set your coil body appearance to, say, Polished Copper.  Then, apply "Stainless Steel - Brushed Linear Long" to just the outside faces.  Then, customize this material to have the same color properties as copper, and bump up the scale to  pretty big.  The result is OK if you are not looking for great details:

Here are the settings I used for the stainless steel brushed material:

If it is not obvious how to do this, let me know, and I can do a screencast.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[jeff_strater]

Oh, I forgot one critical detail:  You have to set the "Texture Map Controls" for the body to "Cylindrical" in order to get the brushed pattern to line up on the face:

Jeff

[Anonymous]

Hi-

Thanks for the help. I think I did what you suggested, but I get a funny seam right on top. I tried applying another appearance, then the new one, but no luck. I also tried starting over but on a different surface, but the seam always came back in the same place. Any ideas on how to fix this?

-Greg

[jeff_strater]

good observation, @Anonymous.  I did not notice that seam at first, but it does exist on my model as well:

I don't know whether you can fix this, to be honest.  Any time you have a texture like this, there has to be a seam, but I'm not sure why it doesn't occur on an edge, where it will be less apparent.  I will try to find out.

If you really want to try to model the wires, we can look at that.  I think if you don't really try to model the coil, there are ways that you could do that that won't be quite as expensive.

Jeff

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

followup:  I tried actually modeling the wires.  Not as a coil, but as an array of bodies that were all the same.   I started with creating a sketch on the edge of the main body, and drew a semi-circle:

Then I used Sweep and picked the edge of the coil body as the path.  I chose "New Body", so I could keep the geometry separate:

Then I created a rectangular pattern of this new body along the width of the main body.  I played around with lots of spacing and size options.  Here is just one:

If you zoom out, it looks pretty good.  Here is a rendering:

But, the bottom line is:  This is pretty slow, and affects model size and performance.  I put my "wires" into a different component so that I could turn them off.  But still, compute performance is affected by this method, so use it with caution

Jeff

[Anonymous]

Hey, that looks great. I'll probably implement it when I need to supply drawings for presentations. Thanks for all the help.

-Greg