Heart Shaped Container FreeCAD Tutorial
Made a FreeCAD tutorial for making this container: https://makertube.net/w/mg7rdKStSUua7AhnAt1RoM I have to warn you that I made a bunch of mistakes and it may be really hard to follow.
Container? Not a Nirvana fan I see.
I know, right?
I have a couple tips if you don't mind.
When sketching a line attached to a circle, using a tangent contraint will make the transition between the curve and straight smooth.
Rather than sketching the inside wall and cutting it away, you can just do a shell/thickness command. Alternately, you can offset a sketch from the outside geometry rather than drawing all the features manually again.
Consider how the part is made, you have two very sharp corners on the centerline where the nozzle cannot create the geometry, these areas will be rounded by default, it is better to add fillets so you control what the machine does.
Thank you! Those are great tips. I tried to use the thickness command when I was doing a practice run but it didn't work. I think because of the sharp area at the bottom of the heart. I'm thinking if I rounded it like you suggested it might have worked.
Mainline freecad always annoyed me because it has messages that pop up and really frustrated me to no end
The realthunder fork suppresses a lot of the popups which made it a lot less annoying to work with
Mistakes are how we learn. What learnings have you made? What process did you take to get there? That would be worth writing down for others.
We tend to focus too much on "this is how I succeeded in
<thing>
" and don't talk about all the false starts along the way that taught the skills to succeed.Yes, thank you! The biggest thing I learn is not to try to constrain arcs by constraining the center point, two out points and setting a radius because that is over constraining. I don't know how I didn't realize that.
I generally do them by locating the center point, constraining the radius, and then the angle. The angle tool is a little janky specifically on arcs, but it does work. Or if the ends of the arc are fixed to something also immovable, you can just do the radius and angle and use the coincident constraint to stick its endpoints to the ends of other lines and leave the center point alone.
Yours was an interesting approach. I probably would have used a bezier for the pointy end of the heart.