Hi Alibre community!
Finally gave in and bought an Alibre Atom license. Have been demoing the full version for some time earlier this year and decided that even though the full version is very tempting, Atom should also be suitable for iterating on ideas for now.
As one of the first tests I tried to port a project that I have been working on with CadQuery before, to see how far I come. Good news is - came far enough that I'm confident that it should be possible with Atom. Not sure how / whether I can take over some of the parametric features of the original CadQuery program though: This e.g. has a parameter "num_pipes" that defines how many of these "pipe" structures shown in the screenshot below there are. Currently I just manually built four pipes in the Atom part. This was quite straightforward. But it would be good if I could easily change that to e.g. 3 - or even 25 without having to manually readjust all the sketches each time.
Additionally I want the length-wise (curved) edges to be rounded, so I tried to add fillets to those. Apparently this doesn't seem to work: I open the fillet tool, click on one of these rounded edges, Atom calculates for some minutes and then tells me "BL_CAP_COMPLEX: No acceptable order found to connect surfaces".
Not a big issue in this case, as I can make the shape round by adding the round corners into the initial sketches already before lofting, so the resulting body would get rounded. Just wanted to see how far I'd come with fillets in Atom in this case. (CadQuery could create the fillets but got really slow with this, so I also went with adding corners to the sketches there.)
So my questions would be:
* Is there a chance with Atom to implement that num_pipes parameter that automatically generates the desired shape for arbitrary values of num_pipes?
* If not with Atom, would that be possible with Pro/Expert? And if yes, does this only work with scripting or would there be a UI way? (Having a UI based tool for playing around with ideas visually is what I plan to use Atom for mainly)
* Is it to be expected that fillets only work on straight edges? Or is there something specific with the rounded edges in this example that the fillet engine doesn't seem to like (no matter the fillet radius)?
Thumbs up regarding the UI by the way, it is quite intuitive!
One slightly odd (but non-critical) behavior: Sometimes the "ok" button in dialogs is greyed out for no obvious reason. When closing the dialog, and repeating the sequence in a slightly different order then it mostly works though - so probably a bug in the new version? (Example: Create a measure in a sketch, click on the formula symbol, in the formula editor click on "+" to create a new variable. Then select that variable. Now one cannot click "ok" because it's greyed out. When closing the formula editor, opening it again and then selecting the previously created variable it is possible to click ok.)
Finally gave in and bought an Alibre Atom license. Have been demoing the full version for some time earlier this year and decided that even though the full version is very tempting, Atom should also be suitable for iterating on ideas for now.
As one of the first tests I tried to port a project that I have been working on with CadQuery before, to see how far I come. Good news is - came far enough that I'm confident that it should be possible with Atom. Not sure how / whether I can take over some of the parametric features of the original CadQuery program though: This e.g. has a parameter "num_pipes" that defines how many of these "pipe" structures shown in the screenshot below there are. Currently I just manually built four pipes in the Atom part. This was quite straightforward. But it would be good if I could easily change that to e.g. 3 - or even 25 without having to manually readjust all the sketches each time.
Additionally I want the length-wise (curved) edges to be rounded, so I tried to add fillets to those. Apparently this doesn't seem to work: I open the fillet tool, click on one of these rounded edges, Atom calculates for some minutes and then tells me "BL_CAP_COMPLEX: No acceptable order found to connect surfaces".
Not a big issue in this case, as I can make the shape round by adding the round corners into the initial sketches already before lofting, so the resulting body would get rounded. Just wanted to see how far I'd come with fillets in Atom in this case. (CadQuery could create the fillets but got really slow with this, so I also went with adding corners to the sketches there.)
So my questions would be:
* Is there a chance with Atom to implement that num_pipes parameter that automatically generates the desired shape for arbitrary values of num_pipes?
* If not with Atom, would that be possible with Pro/Expert? And if yes, does this only work with scripting or would there be a UI way? (Having a UI based tool for playing around with ideas visually is what I plan to use Atom for mainly)
* Is it to be expected that fillets only work on straight edges? Or is there something specific with the rounded edges in this example that the fillet engine doesn't seem to like (no matter the fillet radius)?
Thumbs up regarding the UI by the way, it is quite intuitive!
One slightly odd (but non-critical) behavior: Sometimes the "ok" button in dialogs is greyed out for no obvious reason. When closing the dialog, and repeating the sequence in a slightly different order then it mostly works though - so probably a bug in the new version? (Example: Create a measure in a sketch, click on the formula symbol, in the formula editor click on "+" to create a new variable. Then select that variable. Now one cannot click "ok" because it's greyed out. When closing the formula editor, opening it again and then selecting the previously created variable it is possible to click ok.)