Conceptual Mass Voids

[PhilvK]

I watched a video showing how the instructor made a wine rack by modeling an In-Place Component. In the video, he first created a solid extrusion. To create the bottle openings, he then created a diamond shape for a void extrusion which he copied multiple times before he finished by clicking the green arrow. When I tried to do this in the Conceptual Mass format, I found that I had to create the void shape one-by-one and could not copy the base shape multiple times before finishing the voids. What am I doing wrong, or while in CM do you have to create a void before you can copy it?

[PhilvK]

Related to my initial post above, I created a mass in the Conceptual Mass format, and then created a circle on the face of the mass. Next I created the form shown at #1 below from the circle. After creating it, I tried to copy it along the shaded (active) face in the direction shown by the blue arrow. For some reason however, it won’t copy along the face, but is placing the copy at some strange angle as shown by the red arrow, resulting in the copied form sticking out of the back of the mass as shown at #2.  So…how in the heck do you copy something on the face of a mass?

[constantin.stroescu · Accepted solution]

Align and lock the faces of the body and hole volume prior to copy the hole volume.....work with solids...You will change into voids at the end...

[PhilvK]

Very nice and very helpful Constantin! Thank you.

[PhilvK]

Constantin - I did the same thing by using In-Place Modeling while in a Project File. In that case all I had to do was indicate I was creating a void form, draw my form (in this case circle), copy it multiple times, click the green check mark, and voila, I'm done! No aligning or locking required, and it seems more flexible. Why isn't it that easy in Conceptual Mass mode?

[constantin.stroescu]

I'm afraid I don't understand your quite well . Working in Conceptual Mass seems to be the same....

[PhilvK]

The difference is that when I do the same thing in the In-Place component environment, I do not have do the algining and locking you seem to have to do around the 2:00 minute mark of your screencast.

[chrisplyler]

Are you changing the work plane and picking that face before you begin your circular extrusions? If you do that, they will be hosted to that plane speficially, and the start/end position parameters will always reference that plane. So if you make an extrusion and the start position parameter is set to 0, you know the initial circle will always be on that face.

[PhilvK]

Chris – Yes I pick the face and set the work plane before I start my extrusion. My comment has to do with the ease of doing this in the In-Place environment as opposed to the Conceptual Mass environment. When I do it while in In-Place, I can make my shape, copy it multiple times, then extrude them all at once when finished, and I don’t have to align the shape or lock it to a plane like I have to do in CM. I am just trying to understand why, and/or what I am missing.