Newbie needs advice

[john.w.dailey]

I guess I'll just jump into it...

I am brand new at this. My only cadd experience is a decade old on autocadd...

I am using Pro/E wf4.0 and I am wondering about how I should go about creating the following...

I need to create a series of adjacent hollow prisms that fit together snuggly and collectively are curved (ie they fit together to form a hemisphere).

I can figure out how to make a bunch of cells that aren't curved using the extrude and shell tools... I can figure out how to make a bunch of cells that are curved but are restricted to "rectangular" in 2d (the view from the center of the sphere) using the sweep tool... But I can't figure out how to do both together...

Is there something like "extrude along these (converging) lines"? because that would be perfect...

Anyway, sorry for the rambling nature of my post, and thanks in advance for any help you might provide!

 

[jeff4136]

I'm having a little trouble picturing ... orange slices close?


You can Sweep along converging curves which may be what you want ...
Search the web for +tutorial +"variable section sweep". There are
some freebies to be found. Same applies to most of the discrete
subject basics and there are usually a few good 'model to drawing'
tutorials covering a range of modeling functions.


Or, you may want Boundary Blends or trimmed planar and revolved
surfs or ... hunt for the tutorials, though.

 

[krow72]

John,


If you are trying to make a sphere, your best bet may be revolve. create a datum axis. revolve your curved sketch at the axis to the desired angle. You can then pattern that feature using the axis tomake copies that form a shpere. Hope this is what you were looking for.





Krow72

 

[john.w.dailey]

I'll read up on variable section sweep, thanks!

But orange slices isn't really what I was thinking of... It is hard to describe this in words, you know?

A couple more ways to describe what I am trying to do are...

if you had two concentric spheres of slightly differing radius (say 1m and 1.04m) and you put a bunch of balloons in the space between them, and then inflate the balloons till all of the space between the spheres is occupied by the balloons. I want all the balloon walls in my model.

another way to explain it is... drawing on a 2D sheet a web of lines(squares, pentagons, hexagons, irregular polyhedrons...) and then wrapping this sheet on (a portion of) the surface of a sphere, then you "extrude radially", turning all the 1D lines that make up the boundaries of the polyhedrons into surfaces. At this point all of the intersections between the lines in the 2D initial sheet would be lines pointing toward the center of the sphere. Then if I put on an inner wall (some fraction of a sphere, easy enough...) and an outer wall (the same) I would have what I am looking for.

If there is a technique in Pro/E that sounds like the latter method, that would be ideal... My collaborators always look at this thing in 2D, but it is really globally curved, and being able to draw it in 2D, and then distort it to 3D would really make staying on the same page a lot easier...

Thanks again everyone, I can't imagine that it is easy to understand what I am talking about without pictures...

 

[rasul.ghulam]

Hi


I downloaded this file from net and this might help you.2008-04-22_125707_crystal_ball.zip