Dan Heeks made two fixes to HeeksCAD today that made my life a lot easier.
Sometimes you have a sketch that you want to extrude to multiple faces. For example you have a sketch like this:
And you want a solid like this:
In order to extrude a solid, you need a face. To get a face, you need a sketch. That means the two inside lines have to be duplicated and three separate sketches have to be created, faced, extruded. With simple parts this was a pain, but doable. Complicated parts meant juggling dozens of sketches.
The fix allows you to select a group of elements from a sketch and create a face directly from them. To use it, make sure you un-tick ‘sketches’ from the selection options. Then select the elements that make up the face you want and right-click to ‘convert sketch to face’
The other fix added today will be especially appreciated by anyone using HeeksCAD to design parts for 3D printing. You can now select individual solids from your design and save them out to .STL files.
Thanks for the article.
Is it possible to do something like this with imported .stl models?
If I already have models in .stl how to add machining operations that require faces and sketches?
I’m afraid not. HeeksCAD’s support for imported .STL models is pretty limited. I’d love to see the functionality added and I think it’s possible. HeeksCAD makes heavy use of opencascade and the functions are probably there but not implemented in HeeksCAD.