Basic Attachment Tutorial

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Bance
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Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by Bance »

Following a reply to a forum post https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 88#p456188 .

I decided to make a tutorial on part attachment.

It is available here, Basic_Attachment_Tutorial.

I would appreciate any comments, improvements etc.

Edit : added file here as pending PR for file at Github/FC/Examples

Steve
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AttachmentTutorial.FCStd
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chrisb
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by chrisb »

Thanks for sharing!
A Sketcher Lecture with in-depth information is available in English, auf Deutsch, en français, en español.
LHC
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by LHC »

Steve - I'm a noob and have started working through your tutorial. Will report back when I get to the end of it. Could be a while though. I'm retired and don't have a lot of free time (if you're not retired you'll understand when you are) :lol:

Cheers
Lewis
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by LHC »

Bance wrote: Wed Dec 09, 2020 7:01 pm Following a reply to a forum post https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 88#p456188 .

I decided to make a tutorial on part attachment.

It is available here, Basic_Attachment_Tutorial.

I would appreciate any comments, improvements etc.

Edit : added file here as pending PR for file at Github/FC/Examples

Steve
Steve - Just finished working my way through the tutorial. I'm pretty new to Freecad and there were some holes in my basic knowledge so I was scratching my head for awhile. One thing I did notice - and again, it's only because it was a hole in my basics knowledge is that I had a hell of a time selecting the origin with the sketches - and only later discovered that the arrow display on the origin was the culprit. Engaging the section display in sketcher did the trick ;)

Keeping the geometry of the sketches being moved around when changing the attachment points was a bit hard to keep straight in my head - but again, I attribute this to my inexperience. I would imagine with more use these actions will become smoother.

Great tutorial, and I learned all about this attachment business which I did not have a clue about before starting your tutorial, so two thumbs up !

Cheers,
Lewis
Bance
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by Bance »

Lewis,

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you were able to work through it without major problems.

The tutorial is aimed at people that are fairly comfortable with PartDesign at least.

WRT constraining to the origin (or any other point for that matter,) I tend to manipulate the lines until they are fairly close together and then use box select and hit the 'C' key.

Are you familiar with the constraints keyboard shortcuts? Combined with the polyline tool, one can halve the time it takes to create a sketch.

The attachment modes are a little tricky to visualise at first. I'm going to do some work on the Part attachment wiki page, hopefully I can work out a way to graphically describe the various modes.

Steve.

PS. I'm retired too.
LHC
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by LHC »

Bance wrote: Thu Dec 10, 2020 10:32 pm Lewis,

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you were able to work through it without major problems.

The tutorial is aimed at people that are fairly comfortable with PartDesign at least.

WRT constraining to the origin (or any other point for that matter,) I tend to manipulate the lines until they are fairly close together and then use box select and hit the 'C' key.

Are you familiar with the constraints keyboard shortcuts? Combined with the polyline tool, one can halve the time it takes to create a sketch.

The attachment modes are a little tricky to visualise at first. I'm going to do some work on the Part attachment wiki page, hopefully I can work out a way to graphically describe the various modes.

Steve.

PS. I'm retired too.
Steve -

I'm fairly comfortable with PartDesign but not 100% fluent. Hence these little gaps in my knowledge - I did not mean for you to alter your tutorial to include "my" knowledge gaps though ;)

Although I am familiar with the constraints shortcuts, they are not easily remembered yet. The M key trick with the polyline tool is one that looks particularly slick. I guess it is just lots of "seat time" that causes these shortcuts to become automatic.

Thanks again for your efforts to bring us newcomers up to speed with FC.

Cheers,
Lewis
LarryWoestman
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by LarryWoestman »

Thanks, Bance!

I just worked through your tutorial and it was a big help! I learned a lot of things that will be useful to me as a beginner in FreeCAD.

In a couple of places the tutorial specified "use equations" but didn't specify what equations to use. As a beginner, it wasn't obvious to me which equations were appropriate even though I could see what the final value was supposed to be. It would help my learning process if I could see the proper equations so that I could compare them with mine and learn from any differences.

Larry Woestman
chrisb
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by chrisb »

LarryWoestman wrote: Tue Dec 15, 2020 12:49 am It would help my learning process if I could see the proper equations so that I could compare them with mine and learn from any differences.
Bance has attached the file to the first post.
A Sketcher Lecture with in-depth information is available in English, auf Deutsch, en français, en español.
Bance
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by Bance »

Larry,

Thank's for the feedback, I had thought it would be obvious, since the expressions are used earlier in the tutorial. However it is only minor thing and if it makes things more explicit it is a worthwhile edit. Done!

I have made a PR to have the file included in the FC/examples repo. It seems a bit slow to happen, so I've made a direct link to my fork. The file is now available in the title box at the top of the wikipage.

Steve.
LarryWoestman
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Re: Basic Attachment Tutorial

Post by LarryWoestman »

Chrisb - thanks for the reminder that there was a file that I could look at. That didn't occur to me. One more thing to learn!

Bance - thanks for the change. Hopefully it will help others over time.
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