Thanks for all the positive feedback folks!
Apologies for the lack of updates here. It's not that I haven't been working on it, just that there's not been anything worth posting.
To bring you all up to date then, I've been working on my CAD design skills (or more accurately, lack thereof). Specifically, the seats. The challenge was to design seats with tufting, ie the little buttons which pull the leather inwards. I first had to learn how to get that effect, then had to work out how to backfill the empty space behind, all while working in a non-planer (curved), environment.
There's a great video on youtube showing how to work in the form environment to get the tufting, but it's done in a flat plane. After a little trial and error I managed to get the hang of the form environment and how to set up a plane and manipulate it, the hardest part was how to do it on a curved rather than flat surface.
Basically, it's all down to the initial sketches. I drew the frame for the seat with the intention of using that to extrude a square tube for the seat frame with a width of 0.4mm. Unfortunately you can't use a face from that to anchor the new face in the form environment. After a few tries and redrawing the initial sketches so that all the reference points aligned, I drew some construction lines perpendicular to the initial sketch with a length of 0.2mm (half the width of the extruded square section pipe) to give me a guide - the initial sketch would be the centre point of said pipe. Once those refs were done I drew another spline to match the existing pipe centreline and aligned at 0.2mm off it. That would give me a reference which was level with the edge of the tube and which I could use as the plane for the new form face so it was level with the inner edge of the frame.
I also needed to do the same thing to create a "cutter" to trim the new form to the correct shape once it was done since it has to be created as a rectangular shape.
Difficult to explain, but if anyone wants any help I'll try to be more explicit about the process. Basically what it boiled down to was that any failures I encountered were almost always due to bad drawings at the beginning. Either line end points not being aligned, or gaps in the faces. Most of them were not visible as we're talking errors of 0.001mm or so, but that's enough. Make sure that the constraints are set and that when lines are drawn you have the little square shown when clicking the fix points - they indicate that the point is aligned with another (just make sure it's the point you want!)
So here are the 4 stages, each approximately one day's work...
Day 1
Day 2
By this point I had figured out the tufting and how to manipulate the surface but couldn't fill the back or thicken it.
Day 3
Front face now properly aligned but still unable to fill in behind
Day 4
I'll take that!
Yes, it's 4 day's work, but I now have a better understanding of how it works. The last stage, Day 4 took only about 3 hours instead of 5 or 6 so progress and knowledge!
I will now try to get a new nose profile done before I fly back to the UK on 26th for my 60th with family. When I return, I will be concentrating on a DH4 and DH9 for a DH group build on Britmodeller forum (I'll post them here too) so it will be a while before I get back to this one.
Thanks for looking in!
Ian
