Problem with PEDIT to Extrude Shape

[Bill Tillman]

I have a picket for a fence we're building and the manufacturer supplied me with a CAD file for it. It's an odd shape ornamental aluminum part and I'd like to PEDIT it so I can extrude it and make it part of a 3D model. There are some splines as well as lines in this shape and for some reason I cannot get the PEDIT command to close it. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

OK, I tested this with the JOIN command and got what I was after. Learn something new every day.

13-95725-803.dwg

Edited August 1, 2011 by Bill Tillman

[Jack_O'neill]

Turn the splines into polylines one at a time, then join them.

[eldon]

Pedit does not work with Spline curves. However, if you Flatten the Spline, it becomes a polyline.

[Jack_O'neill]

Pedit will convert a spline to a polyline, but you have to enter a precision. Thats why I said do them one at a time. Looks like this after it's extruded:

 

Here is the command line sequence:

 

Command: pedit

Select polyline or [Multiple]:

Object selected is not a polyline

Do you want to turn it into one? y

Specify a precision :

[eldon]

Isn't progress marvellous

 

You used to be able to do them all together, and now you can do them one at a time.

[Jack_O'neill]

What it won't do is convert a spline during the "join" option. You have to convert them one at a time first, then it will join them. When I did the one on the inside (or, to the right in Bill's drawing) then joined it, it found 77 segments!

[rvpas]

You can use Presspull too

Home tab/Modeling panel/PressPull

Click inside your boundary area and give height

Bye

Pascal

[JD Mather]

There are some splines as well as lines in this shape and for some reason I cannot get the PEDIT command to close it.

 

As indicated - presspull does not have the limitation of requiring a closed polyline.

You can have any combination of lines, polylines, splines, circles and arcs form your boundary with presspull.

 

No need to convert splines to polylines, no reason to PE Join, no need to flatten.

Since release 2007 you should almost always be using presspull rather than extrude.

[Jack_O'neill]

As indicated - presspull does not have the limitation of requiring a closed polyline.

You can have any combination of lines, polylines, splines, circles and arcs form your boundary with presspull.

 

No need to convert splines to polylines, no reason to PE Join, no need to flatten.

Since release 2007 you should almost always be using presspull rather than extrude.

 

I didn't even know presspull existed till I got 2010 and still rarely use it. Just can't seem to remember that it's there for some reason.

[JD Mather]

I didn't even know presspull existed till I got 2010 and still rarely use it.

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/AU2007/GD115-4P%20Mather.pdf

see page 5

and Tutorial 1 in my signature.

[Jack_O'neill]

Thanks..I'll check it out. Now that I work for me, I might have time to do stuff like this. Working at the dinosaur (as I call them) there was never time to do stuff like that. They very much discouraged any use of 3d and would crawl right up your shorts for spending any time on it. "We don't have time to draw stuff on 3D, it's just lines on paper anyway" was the battle cry of most of the management staff. And before you ask, there was no changing thier minds. They didn't understand it, and they didn't want to, and they'd make that perfectly clear at your performance review if you persisted and did it anyway. There's the right way, the wrong way and the company way, and if you didn't like it, there was the door.

[SEANT]

Creating a REGION is the other option for combining spline curves with more conventional geometry.

Depending on the complexity of the drawing (i.e., exposed database) the automated boundary finding capabilities of PRESSPULL can be quite slow. It may make sense to just select the geometry and convert it explicitly with the REGION command.

 

The explicit pre-step also allows the use of composite geometry in the commands for non-linear solids (revolve, sweep, etc.).

[therealsaint01]

3 steps... 1) explode all the lines. 2) click draw, select region and select all the lines. 3) extrude

[Bill Tillman]

I didn't think about Press/Pull either. But in the end I will be applying materials to this shape and thus I'm assuming the REGION command must be deployed. I am trapped on other parts of this project for the moment but will get back to this when I do the rendering and will try the Press/Pull method.

 

Oh yeah, all I did was simply JOIN all the lines and splines and it worked out fine.

[SEANT]

JOIN is a fairly new command, and I’m still exploring the benefits/hazards of using it. When I first saw that command I hoped it would be an alternate method for creating a filleted 3d Polyline. Sadly, neither SWEEP nor EXTRUDE (with PATH option) will work with splines joined in that fashion. See sample.

 

As a side note: One benefit to using REGIONs – due to their composite nature – is that all sub curve object snaps (MID, CEN, QUA, etc.) are still available. Those may be useful for other downstream tasks.

FilletedSpline.dwg

[rvpas]

Bien vu ! Seant

I had forgotten the command region in more that the only one who allows to extrude profiles with drillings as profiles aluminum of the manufacturer.

 

 

Bye

Pascal

[rvpas]

Deviant

To divert your problem I use 2 methods

 

UCS + PLINE 2D + FILLET

 

 

or CONVERT TO PLINE in SPLINEDIT

 

 

the difference is the précision of extrusion

 

see my drawing FilletedSpline-rvpas.zip

[SEANT]

Deviant

To divert your problem I use 2 methods . . . .

 

 

Both of those methods are good, and are well capable of producing useful geometry. It is interesting , though, that Autodesk hasn’t invested more time in this functionality. As good as those two methods may be, I would not exactly call them “user friendly”.

 

 

 

One of the members on this forum, scj, wrote a lisp routine (pedit3d) that simplifies the process. The end result is a faceted fillet similar to what is returned via the SPLINEDIT –convert to Polyline method.

 

 

 

A while ago I had looked at the problem from the solid side:

 

http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=30499.msg361302#msg361302

 

One of the drawbacks with that methodology is determining what radius to use. I may pull that routine out and look at it with all the new stuff AutoCAD 2012 has to offer.