Grid Extrude Tour: Custom Feature for Onshape
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- Опубликовано: 3 июл 2024
- This video shows how to use a custom feature for extruding grids of shapes, like hexagons, squares, triangles, etc. The feature is useful for making reinforcing rib networks on plastic parts, but it is also good for general purpose texturing of flat faces on parts.
Link to Grid Extrude:
cad.onshape.com/documents/d14...
Links to Other custom features shown
Selection Fillet:
cad.onshape.com/documents/03d...
Fill Pattern:
cad.onshape.com/documents/573...
Transform Pattern:
cad.onshape.com/documents/25a...
00:00 intro
00:14 Examples
00:48 Interface tour
4:36 Detailed examples
5:43 What NOT to do
8:22 Alternative feature
9:35 Wrapping up 
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I am a lonely noob. I was today years old when I learned I could search for and add custom tools to the toolbar. Thanks! This is fun, I took a break from playing with it to say it could be a very useful and time saving tool for jewelry designers that use CAD. Imagine creating a piece of jewelry with hundreds of stones (Iced Out) this tool could be game changer.
Thanks! It only works on extrudable things (i.e. not the outside of a whole ring), but it could certainly be used in that way in some cases. There are a lot of fantastic custom features out there from the community.
Just came here to say this tool was incredibly useful to me. Thanks for taking the time to share your work!
I'm so glad.
You're work is much appreciated.
thanks!
Thank You So Much. This is a Dream Come True. New to OnShape after 20 Years of SolidWorks and there is no turning back.
Right!? I've wanted this feature for years, and now I can just make it
I'm in love!
I just started using OnShape for knife prototyping and this feature will be a godsend for texturing scales.
Right on!
This is absolutely genius. Hours of work done in seconds. You're a legend dude!!
I get happy using it for sure, because I've done it the hard way too many times.
This is so great! Real time saver 😃 After using this feature, I found it very user friendly and met my project needs. I do have a suggestion for a minor addon, if possible…maybe add a thickness parameter for the border. Thank you for your feature!!
Awesome! I assumed that I'd almost always want the border the same width, and for the other times I can always follow up this feature with another thin extrude of the same profile if you need a different border width. It's always a battle to keep feature interfaces simple, and this one is already pretty complex. But you're not the first person to suggest it, so I'll think about it.
Thank you. I haven't even finished watching but I've already loaded it and can't wait to put it to use!
awesome!
That will save me so much time. Absolute game changer. Thank you 🙏
Happy to help!
Exactly what I need to add some texture. Thank you.
Happy to help!
THANK YOU FOR THIS! I'm new and I was banging my head against a wall just to a get a simple pattern on a surface. You rock!
Glad it helped!
I just found your channel and love the content. Please keep em coming.
Thank you! Will do!
THANKS so much for this - have designed parts with similar patterns ealier, struggling with both performance and flexibility (especially the parts near the side etc). Super handy for 3D-printing :)
Awesome! I've been doing CAD (esp Onshape) long enough that when I find a recurring pain-point, I've got to assume that others feel it to, so if there's a way to address it with a custom feature, I like to try.
This is really good. It has some minor quarks, but I can certainly live with that. It's a real time saver! Thanks.
Glad it helped!
I just spent about 3 hours trying to create a sieve / screen with holes... and tried a bunch of different ways (I'm a noob)... but this is BRILLIANT! I'm subscribing just for this! Keep up the great work!!!
right on!
Dude.... You just saved me so much headache and time. Thankyou! I've made several honey comb designs and they were a pain. This takes me seconds. Thankyou again! You have my sub good sir.
Thanks! 🙌 They really are a pain to model manually, and even more so if you want it to be updateable.
Awww yeah I really want to try this - I have some similar geometry in a pot holder / hot pad. This looks amazing!!
I think I know the ones. Like these? m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71-0FS8W2CL._AC_SL1374_.jpg
I couldn't help but imagine spending all this time coding it for people to only use it for bar mats, haha. I mean, it's the perfect tool for that though, I just hope someone also uses it on something that goes to space.
Dude, your extension is game changer !
I was struggling to create a grid with holes.
5 seconds with your extension
Thanks!
Love it, great job!
Thank you!
like like like. I tried 2 other featurescripts and then made this manually out of a sketch pattern before finding this featurescript.
Works perfectly and I will use it in ALLLL my 3D prints going forward.
nice work handling all the edge conditions to allow it to form cool surface patterns too!.
Glad it helped!
Works beautifully on iOS app and free account
I've never tried on mobile. Glad it's working
OMG this is so nice. I’ve used this and it’s amazing. Subscribing to see what other tools you have.
Right on! Onshape does have a way to publish official versions of custom features too to help people wade through the tons of copies, but it's on the to-do list. For now the best way to find other features from Ovyl is to go to the public section of Onshape and search "Ovyl" which is in the document name for all of them. Some of the features are very fleshed out and productized like this one, and others are made more quickly, but could be handy too.
Oh wow, just a few days ago I struggled to create a hexagonal pattern that filled a particular face so I could have a honeycomb effect on one of my 3D printed parts. I was literally scrubbing back and forth in one of your Onshape tips & tricks videos but just couldn't make it behave how I wanted (and Onshape really started to cough and splutter once the pattern became large, lots of spinners). In the end, I used the Bambu slicer to create an exposed honeycomb infill as a workaround. I can't wait to get back in front of Onshape and test your feature out!
One thought: it would still be great one day to have a video detailing how to create these patterns manually, for those of us who like to know how things work from first principles.
Nice! it's perfect for that application. As for a video about how to do it manually, there are a ton of ways. Here's an example of one nice way: cad.onshape.com/documents/873165cc6d04ade445104eb1/w/47abdb40a132a6283df63fa5/e/2a4880ce2e99ae4427f41d6a
We love our bambu machines over here too btw.
Genius! Thank you!
Grazie!
I need to tell you mate, this is a very useful and very clever thing. Makes very easy to do a patterned surface for my 3d printing products. Wish I can do features like this. 🙂
I use onshape to designing for our carpenter department at the moment as a job (3d printing is hobby) and I need to do a few steps same way every time. Like cutting channels into 90 degres boards, then adjust these channels with tolerance and so on. A few things when feature scripts could help me a lot. Started to learning as try to understand the code in scripts other made, but it is a bit hard for me yet. But I really enjoyed all of your videos, so please carry on and do more. Probably (if you have time) can start a feature script writing tutorial video?
Thanks! Featurescript really is an amazing tool in Onshape but since I didn't have code background prior, the learning curve was quite steep and took many many frustrating hours and lots of kind help from people on the forum to get just about anything working. Now I'm finally getting comfortable enough with it to have fun. I do have hopes of making some of the tutorials that would have helped me starting out, but no idea when I will get to it. It sounds like a perfect tool for the kinds of repetitive workflows you're talking about too.
thanks for this. found it and had a playuld be useful
Great to hear!
Excelent!!!❤
thank you
Once again, nail on the head! This type of geometry creation is always awkward to make and even more awkward to edit. This has been such a missing feature.
Thanks, Shawn! I definitely stand by the purpose of it, but I'd love one that's made by a better coder than me. I've already found some funny scenarios I'd love to fix if I have the time.
Thank you
You're quite welcome
I managed to figure it out. a possibler upgrade suggestion would be to give the option of changing the boundary width /thickness
I considered it, but I try to remember that features are all meant to work together, and it's not a big pain to just add a separate Extrude feature set to Thin. The feature UI is already complex and I didn't want to add to it.
🙏 THANK YOU 🙏
You are so welcome
thanks mate
very handy, really needs a speed boost, many small holes takes a while to compute
Agreed on all of the above, but I have no plans to optimize this one farther, and for some situations, other features/techniques will be better, as outlined in the latter half of the video.
Cool!
thanks
Thank you so much, I spent two hours trying to do something similar with just ribs and I almost went bald. This is a perfect tool for me. I found a small glitch, when I try and mirror the feature to go to the other side of the part I get an inverted thing on the other side.
Thanks! It definitely addresses a pain point we have. I have more work to do to make this pay well with feature patterns. As a workaround for now, you could model the ribs as a new body, and mirror that, then boolean it together.
Great tool! 😁
Having an option for boundary width would be nice too.
Thanks! I considered a separate boundary width, but figured the feature was already getting complex, and I try to think of any custom feature in the bigger context of the whole feature list. With that in mind, I recommend just doing this one without the border, and following it up with a second Extrude feature in Thin mode for the boundary.
@@ovylThanks. That's exactly what I did for this one.
Thanks, this is really useful, I just wish there was a setting for 'full hexes only'. For example, at 1:14 you have these little nubs sticking out from the top hexes, and I don't want those. I found the only way to get rid of them is to have the perfect underlying sketch which I found meant having to do everything twice. Use the tool to set up the grid you want, then go in and use that result to set up another sketch you use for the final result. I can't change hex size and spacing because those are precise for the project. Unless I'm just missing something.
I understand the issue, but don't have a perfect workaround for you. Neil Cooke's Fill Feature (linked in the description) might be better as it only does full hexes. I've not tried it, but there could be a clever way to use the move face command twice to get rid of them. First you could move the exterior faces in so that the little edges disappear, then move them back out by the same amount, but I don't get the feeling that solution is all that stable either. The other stable solution is likely to involve some more code. One could, for example, create a feature to follow this one up that finds all faces made by the Grid Extrude feature and deletes ones that are under a certain area or something like that.
@@ovyl Thanks for the reply. Have to say your tool is much more intuitive than Neil's. Tried his, and couldn't make it do anything, just errors. Think I'll just stick to yours. 😊
@@joncorso6103 Thanks for the kind words, but I'll say his is certainly worth the learning curve and I use either one depending on what I'm doing. His is faster to regenerate so for models where that matters most it's my preference.
Thanks. New to OnShape and been trying to get something like this worked out. Would there be a method to do alternating rectangle rows? Sort of like a brick wall.
Ah that's a good idea, but not supported currently with this feature
I can't find this tool even search doesn't show it... have they removed it from the free version, or it was never there?
Don't worry, you can access it. Since it's a custom-made feature it's not there by default. You'll have to add it to your toolbar. There are links to this and other features in the description. Follow those and look for a "+" icon to add it.
@@ovyl thank you, its very nice of you to reply and guide an armature. Good luck to you!
Is there a way to make it hug a surface contour, like the outside of a curved surface (vase)?
No not really. It's still just an extrude feature at the end of it, so the results will always be a projection, not a wrap. Here's an example of that, but look into the wrap feature: cad.onshape.com/documents/d1489499c6bfdc52ce5cf32a/w/c544b659a37041d14e810028/e/ce0196e0af870f66119c1727
how do you use it to put on curved faces like a vase for example
This one is only for flat stuff. You could use it to extrude up to a face with an offset to get a debossed effect on something that isn't flat, but it couldn't wrap a cylinder well. For that, look into Attractor Pattern, which I also wrote, or Texture by Michael Pascoe.
Attractor Pattern: cad.onshape.com/documents/ca03eaf542826bb98f6cc90e/w/dda165f92e2ad786bd53d97a/e/9b97d9037f0e0bb481cf6111
Texture: cad.onshape.com/documents/46897a2d60ade8dbb04077f3/v/fd618404d70d644d45e12f84/e/201138fdd8eee8cfcd2dcac1
I'm pretty new to Onshape and have spent what feels like half my life trying to design a hexagonal extruded grid. This tool is an incredible feature. How do I get the tool / button into my Onshape when I logon in?
glad you figured it out!
Have you figured it out? I've been searching and still haven't figured out how to add this feature.
@@CK_area_Sports there's a link in the video description. If you're still stuck, check the Onshape help documentation for "Custom Feature" and see how to add them there.
@@ovyl I appreciate the reply. I just now found a video explaining how to do it. I am so new to Onshape I can barely navigate through the program but I did get it! Thank you so much for the video and sharing this file.
Is it possible to just generate the sketch and leave the extrude part to the user?
Not the way it's coded. This one actually is patterning the extruded hexagons, not the hexagon sketch. This is to improve performance (it would make it way slower to actually draw all of the hexagons and extrude them)
When searching for Grid extrude its not in my tools. Any idea as to why this may be the case?
I'm not sure, but the link to add it to your toolbar is in the video notes. As with all custom features, you'll have to add it to your toolbar.
I'm still a noob. Can you tell me how to get this script for my document? I couldn't find it on the custom features list
Sure! The links to this and some other features are in the video description. Follow the instructions from the help docs to get them added. ovyl.onshape.com/help/Content/customfeature.htm?Highlight=custom%20feature
Works on the mobile app???
I don't use mobile much, but it ought to work. You can find instructions for adding it here cad.onshape.com/help/Content/customfeature.htm#StepsiOS
is there an option for boundary thickness?
Not currently, but you could do it without the boundary, then follow it up with a regular Extrude set to Thin mode.
is there a way to use it on a curved surface?
in a limited way, yes, but it's still just an extrude feature at the end of it, so the results will always be a projection, not a wrap. Here's an example: cad.onshape.com/documents/d1489499c6bfdc52ce5cf32a/w/c544b659a37041d14e810028/e/ce0196e0af870f66119c1727
Thank you!
I can't find it
it's in the video description
How can I add this to my Onshape? Sorry new Onshape/CAD designer.
No worries! The link to this (and some other) features are in the video description, and you can learn about adding custom features here in the help docs: cad.onshape.com/help/Content/customfeature.htm?Highlight=custom%20feature
Selection Fillet script link please?
I added it to the video description.