Dave's intersection technique: A bracket - Rhino Tutorial

- [Instructor] So we continue with another intersection demo and to make this simple bracket. We'll take the basics from earlier and expand them for a slightly more complex shape. A few tips to remember, we're not going to try to build the final shape all at once, and we're going to look for an intersection of two separate parts. Whether that's curves or surfaces. So as we review this shape, I'm seeing that we can probably do like an U-shape profile for the top view. And if we come around to the side, that looks like it's another simple profile. Maybe a line going over there, back and to the other direction. Let me go ahead and start on the top view. I'm going to double click to switch to all the view ports, and then double click on top to maximize that. Just to make this go a little quicker and easier I'm going to go ahead and turn on the grid snap, and we can just count some of the squares here. I'm going to use a polyline, and I'm going to start here by just counting squares. It'd be really simple and fast. We don't have to worry about drawing half and then mirroring. So I'm going to start up there at the top quadrant, come down, going three to the opposite side, and then come back up and just try to line up those two curves there. So it looks like that's perfectly symmetrical. Next thing is we want to pre-fill at eyes. This is another really cool trick. So instead of waiting to the very end when everything is sharp we can put the fill it's into the curves. So that is a curve tool command. And over here at fill it on the very first line I'm going to type in a radius of 10. Okay, so let's make sure that the options here are set to join and trim both. Yes, that way we avoid having little pieces and they're all joined together. So we just click both sides. We get a nice little arc there. Right click to repeat and do the other two sides. Now we've already talked about giving this a wall thickness. However, we don't have to draw any more curves since we're in the curve tools area. We can take advantage of the existing geometry and leverage it. Let's go over to curve offset and Imma type in a distance of 10. So we picked this original curve we just did. We do have a direction we can go, return off the grid snap here for a moment. So we can go either side or both, I'm going to select the outside. And it looks like it capped the end. So this is another option a lot of people don't think about. I just want to point this out. I'm going to undo that, and then change this back so we can leave them open just for this example. But a lot of times if you want closed surfaces that's are really good little technique. So I'm going to right click up here. This is another way to repeat commands and offset the curves. Just say cap equal none, and we'll do that one more time at 10. Now it's important to notice that we typically like uniform walls. And that just means that this interior curve here is a radius of 10. The outside curve needs to be bigger. So it's the inside radius plus the wall thickness. So notice how the uniform wall thickness flows around. Keep that in mind for a lot of products that are manufactured. You don't have that get thicker by having the same radius. So they definitely need to follow each other and be parallel. Okay, we're going to go to the right side, we're going to double click on the layer. I think I can just draw right here. This time I'm going to do another polyline. I'm going to try to overlap it. Again, grid snap should be back on. Start off here maybe count three up. Make sure we don't go too far, I want to have these overlap. You'll see in just in a second. So I want to come up maybe five from the top, count the same five to the bottom, and then the other end should be right across. Again, this is just a little quicker and simpler. We don't have to worry about mirroring. Let's go ahead and maximize perspective viewport, and see what we got. And I'm going to zoom in here. So there's the two different directions. And I think we'll just go straight ahead and extrude these curves. So we have to do them separately because they're going different directions, but these are all in the same plane. So we can pick those together. We go surface, extrude curve, straight. This is the both sides option. So if you don't see it you can the command line right up here. So that's pretty standard. It'll go one direction by default, both sides that was really handy. Another thing to watch out for don't try to make this the exact size of the final. Make it way bigger, and then you don't have to worry about having a mistake where it's just a tiny bit short. Okay, let's pick the opposite curve. I'm going to right click, or you can go up in the command line and right click. There's all the last commands. I'm going to go out way bigger than needed. Now in the past I've shown techniques where we can split A to B, then B back to A, that works great. Here's a little bit of a shortcut if you have really simple pieces like we do here. We can just pick all three of these surfaces. I'm going to hold down Shift while I pick the second and third one. Now this will only work if they completely define an enclosed solid space inside. So look up to the solid menu, and almost at the bottom we're going to select create solid. And this looks a little bit weird, but it actually found two solutions. We don't need this inside part , so we can actually just select it and hit Delete. This is a nice and simple shape that we've made from a very small set of curves. Now I notice that the final we looked at earlier it's got some nice filling on here. Let's take a peek. A lot of times you will have two passes of fillets. So let's go back down here. And even if we didn't have this reference you wouldn't know which to do first. This is the tricky spot here. We've got three edges meeting. So let's ask this question backwards. Which is the smaller curve? That's pretty obvious. It's going to be this narrow edge here. That just means that the opposite edge is the larger one and we should do it first. So we can go to the solid menu, select FilletEdge. I'm going to change the radius to 10. Make sure this is nice and big. We can actually select those edges, draw a box around one or two. And if you're really good you can maybe just get multiple inside of your box. So it looks like we have all four of those edges dialed into 10. I'm going to right click to execute. Get a little bit of a preview here, and there you go. So that's a nice big 10 unit radius, which means we can now do the final second radius, which will be smaller. So let's just repeat this last command, FilletEdge. I'm going to take advantage of another line option here a lot of people just kind of skip right by. That is chain edges. First change of the radius. We have to do that upfront, otherwise they'll have to redo this. I'm going to type in three. Again, this is a large 10 unit, but a smaller three unit radius will flow right around. And not have those usual problems you've seen where FilletEdges explode. Now back to the chain edges. This is really handy if you have a lot of segments. And this has a lot of parts, arcs and straight lines. And you'll notice when I clicked it it went all the way around to the very beginning. So we can right click. There's the preview, final preview and hit Okay. I'm going to do this outside edge just a little bit differently. So I'm going to right click to repeat or we can come up here, there's the FilletEdge command. Now instead start of doing the chain edges first, let's just picking edges. You'll start see why that saves a lot of time. So we've got that edge there, it kind of stopped. So there's the arc, here's the other straight edge. The cool thing is we can just pick chain edges at any time, and it's going to finish it up for us. So there you see the orange highlight going all the way around. So again, just right-click. We got a couple previews here. So after several clicks there's your nice edges. So the edges or profiles may not always be obvious. If they're not just try the first thing that comes to mind. If you treat this a little bit like a puzzle then you might notice that the answer will appear to you after you're a part way through.