Master the art of creating three-dimensional objects by learning how to complete a power cord using sweep geometry in design software. This article provides a straightforward, step-by-step guide on selecting the right profile, adding geometry, and adjusting settings for optimal results.
Key Insights
- The sweep functionality in design software creates three-dimensional geometry by sweeping a selected profile along a pre-existing path. Users can select multiple options thanks to the 'chain selection' feature.
- Adjusting settings like 'Distance' and 'Taper' can customize the object's appearance. For instance, setting 'Distance' to 0.5 would create a sweep that's half the total length of the power cord. The 'Taper' and 'Twist' should ideally be left at 0 for this particular design.
- The final steps involve changing the material of the object for more realistic rendering. In this case, the power cord was made to resemble fabric by choosing the 'Fabric White' option under 'Leather and Cloth' in the appearance modification options.
In this video we will finish our power cord. We will create a profile and then sweep it along our existing sketches.
You'll notice I'm still in step 13, chord, and if I will open my power cord, I will activate my chord component. We need to create one more sketch, which is the profile for our sweep geometry. If I zoom in, I want to place a circular sketch on this face, so I will go create sketch on this top face here, and then I will go C for circle.
I'll place it directly in the center and drag out a distance of four millimeters. I think four millimeters will be the size of my chord for now, but if we want, we can always update this later. I'll hit stop sketch, and now we can see a small circle at the base of our spline.
I will hide my lampshade and import lampshade cap assembly to complete my sweep, because it can be confusing when you're selecting your circles. If you look down here, we also need to connect this sketch and this sketch. Well, we can do that by double clicking into sketch three, hiding our switch, and going into three-dimensional space to draw a line.
I will draw a line from the endpoint here to here, and stop my sketch. Now I've connected all of my geometry. I'll turn on my switch again, and we can create our sweep.
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So I will go create sweep. Sweep takes a profile and creates three-dimensional geometry along a path. So I can see that I want to select a profile, so I'll zoom in and select this circle.
Don't accidentally select any of the bigger circles. We only want the center profile. Next, I'll go to path and select this.
We will automatically see its sweep along our first sketch. However, we can continue to click our sketches to add geometry to our model. I will continue to select the entire geometry, making sure that I zoom in and select these small pieces because they are separate lines, and you will see the sweep complete.
Let's talk about the sweep dialog box and see how we can edit our sweep. The chain selection is on, which is why it allowed me to select multiple options. Distance is one, and this works on a percentage.
If I typed in 0.5, it would be half of the total length of my power cord, and it would only go until here. I can also drag my arrow along my sweep and get it back up to the full distance. I don't want to taper, and I don't want to twist, so I will leave those as 0, and I want to use perpendicular.
If I used parallel, it would flatten out the object as it moved along, but that's okay. We want to do perpendicular. Let's create a new body and hit okay.
We can now see our three-dimensional sweep running through our model. This is useful for all types of organically shaped cylindrical objects, like wires, or piping, or anything of the sort. Notice also that when we did our sweep, it turned off all associated sketches so that they are now hidden in our model.
I will turn on my lamp fasteners, lampshade, cap assembly, and fastener assemblies, and activate my top component. Let's go down and group these objects and save our file. The last thing we need to do for our power cord is to change the material.
I will go to modify appearance, and let's go into leather and cloth, find cloth, and I will use fabric white. I'll bring it into my model first, and then apply it directly onto my sweep. You will see it has this nice small texture of a fabric.
I like that. I'll do a zoom extends and save my file. Our power cord geometry is now complete, and the last thing I would like to do in this video is to look at our user parameters.
We've not done this in a while, but I'd like to make sure that they still will change our model the way we want. I'll change my thickness to 10 and the width to 40. Let's hit OK and see what our model looks like.
We can see that this sketch for our power cord is automatically updated. It's become a little tight on this corner, but that's OK. It still looks OK, and all of our geometry seems to be updated accordingly.
I will go back to change the parameters and change them back to 15 and 30. Notice it takes longer to change our user parameters the more geometry we have in the model. This is all I would like to do in this video.
In the next video, we will talk about using capturing position in the timeline to update our shape of our model. I will see you in the next video.
