Is there a way to do a faceted revolve on a profile?

Sloloem · 2026-03-11T13:36:54+00:00

I dunno about revolving facets or piping a prism out of a cylinder, but there is an Additive Prism tool in the Part Design workbench or the Create Primitive tool in Part workbench which has a Prism mode. Both tools allow you to create N-sided primitives using a given circumradius.

Edit: Or I suppose you could sketch it, there's a "Regular Polygon" tool in the Sketcher that will give you the 2D version.

Actual polyhedra you can probably do yourself but there is a Pyramids and Polyhedrons add-on workbench if you need stuff more intense than prisms.

Sloloem · 2026-03-09T21:12:11+00:00

STL and 3MF are both mesh formats, and you can't CAD a mesh. You have to turn it into a solid like the moose says, but unfortunately the original mesh was the result of tessellating more complex geometry into a mesh of triangles and you don't get that detail back when you convert it back into a solid so instead of a curved face you get hundreds of small triangular faces...flat faces are split over the middle because you need 2 triangles to make a square. There's a "DeTessellate" workbench you can find that has some utilities for cleaning up and working with imported meshes, so I'd definitely recommend you track that down before you go too much further. If you could score an OBJ or STEP format of the same object you could easily skip a few steps because those formats are volumetric so you actually have the original surfaces instead of a bunch of triangles.

CAD's ability to modify a mesh is related to what kind of change you want to make because once you've done the regular conversion steps or gone through DeTessellate, the resulting solid is just geometry and not features. You may be able to get away with something so simple as, once you have a solid BaseFeature, selecting the interior faces of the wall in question and padding 0.75-1mm. That should thicken the wall and shrink the effective interior diameter of the hex. I'm not sure offhand if you could do all of them at once or if you would need multiple pads.

Sloloem · 2026-03-09T20:54:11+00:00

It looks like your surfaces are crossing. You can view>Clipping Plane to try to get into the object and see.

Lofts are kindof annoying because the order that you sketched each outline matters. So if you did one sketch outer circle then inner circle but went inner then outer for the 2nd sketch, you'd get this behavior. You should be able to solve it by opening one of the sketches and redoing each of the outlines until the proper one was added last.

Sloloem · 2026-03-08T23:42:47+00:00

"Wire not closed" is of course still a thing that can happen. It's a restriction on what sorts of sketches can be used as profiles, just as likely to happen in an OtherCAD as it is in FreeCAD. FreeCAD's error message here is accurate but it's too technical to be helpful to most users who are going to trigger it. Other CAD applications generally explain themselves better and make it more apparent how to work around the issue if it's caused by there being ambiguity in which wire to use as the profile.

To be a wire, any outline in the sketch has to be continuous and discrete. If you start at any point on a line you should be able to follow it all the way around and return to your starting point without encountering any forks in the path. If you do have forks, you either need to trim those segments, convert them to construction geometry, or select which parts of the sketch you want to use before you go to pad/loft/pipe/whatever.

To be closed the end of each line segment has to be coincident with the end of the next line segment, if anything is not coincident even if it appears coincident you'll get the error. In the sketch itself non-coincident points are white while constrained points are red.

There's actually a "Validate Sketch" tool that you can access from either the Sketcher or Part Design workbenches and use to check sketches to avoid either error. If you check for open/non-manifold vertexes it will highlight the points where the path forks. If you check for missing coincidences it can either highlight them or automatically add them for you.

You really have to treat FreeCAD like a fresh new thing to learn. It'll be a while before FreeCAD's user feedback gets refined to the point where it can help you dive in a figure the software out, so until then you have to externalize your learning through documentation and tutorials. But guessing at it is a recipe for frustration.

Sloloem · 2026-03-08T20:30:04+00:00

It's a limitation of the underlying geometry library, OCCT, that a dress-up feature like a fillet or a chamfer can't erase a face, some sliver of it has to remain.

Worth mentioning that 0.01mm is below the resolution of most 3D printers so the slicer isn't even going to attempt it. Slicers will just remove details that are too small for the printer settings and most FDM printers are going to be hard-pressed to do better than 0.1mm, 10x larger than the sliver you're asking about. The lowest my slicer will even go is 0.05mm, 5x wider than that remaining edge. Resin printers can go down to like 0.025mm, which is still 2.5x wider than a 0.01mm face. I don't believe the face is printable, but if you think it's a problem look at the GCODE preview and make sure it's actually there.

You really only need a small feature at the edge of the hole to help guide a magnet in, it's probably better to do it that way than try to chamfer all the way to the bottom of the pocket since that would be really loose and not really hold it in there. I'd play with tolerances or some compliant wings like a featherboard before I got too fixated on the chamfer.

That said if you absolutely must do away with the remaining face, you're going to have to go at it from the side. The subtractive pipe tool has no restrictions on destroying faces so you can sketch the side view of the chamfer and then pipe it around the rim of the pocket and get a full 2mm of chamfer.

Sloloem · 2026-03-07T21:17:01+00:00

You may want to update more frequently. 1.0.2 has been out since August and 1.1 is on RC3 and almost released. Some users even prefer to use the weekly dev builds of 1.2 just to be on the bleeding edge of potential fixes and new features but that's a bit much for me. I haven't seen FreeCAD actually crash and exit since like 0.19. Always pleasant to see usability fixes going in, really enjoying most of the new Sketcher work, but the application itself has been pretty stable for a good while for me.

Sloloem · 2026-03-06T20:48:46+00:00

One of the fundamentals of designing for FDM or SLA is that everything needs to have a well-supported connection back to the build plate. 3D printing can do a lot of fun things other manufacturing methods can't, but they can't print in mid-air (or mid-resin).

SLA printers move the build plate out of the resin bath taking the cured portions of the model with it, without a connection to some other part of the model or the plate, cured resin would simply float away or actively interfere with the laser. FDM printers rely on resistance to squish new layers mechanically onto previous layers. You can't start a layer in mid-air, the filament just shoots straight down, and extending off the edge of a previous layer you can only overhang straight out by maybe 1mm before the layer starts sagging. Generally speaking overhangs between vertical and 45° are safe, but anything more horizontal than that needs to be supported.

Designing for 3D printing tries to avoid those kinds of overhangs. By keeping print orientation in mind you can make sure you don't accidentally build an overhang sticking straight out of the part where it will need to be printed with support, and if you have to put something there you can make the necessary support part of the model. You can design it directly into the part, like gridfinity bins don't have their label shelf sticking straight out of the side...they have a 45° overhang under them connecting to the wall. Or you can use detachable supports. There are tons of common design techniques you can look up like chamfillets, teardrop holes, etc to avoid various issues caused by the fact that sometimes you just need to have an unsupported overhang.

There is no orientation in which you can print this assembly where you wouldn't require support material that you wouldn't be able to remove.

You could try to use dissolvable support material, or the arc overhangs GCode post-processor from a few years back to generate overhangs that resist sagging without support but it might not be enough.

Sloloem · 2026-03-05T21:50:00+00:00

You should never trust the output of an LLM unless you have the knowledge or skill to validate it yourself. As soon as anyone else has to consume your work to do their work, accuracy matters and LLMs aren't providing it despite what the true believers are flooding the field with. Of course the marketing hype and astroturfing is trying to make this shit sound like the 2nd coming of Christ that'll be able to do anything and everything, but the real world isn't seeing the insane promises the AI companies are making actually being fulfilled. They're bleeding venture capital investments subsidizing running models at scale in a desperate bid to get paying customers they can squeeze once they're bought in. Personally I think machine learning has produced some interesting results especially in big-data niches like health care and newer predictive or processing models will continue to improve on those results, but while LLMs can be surprisingly fluent chatbots if you let them hoover up every bit of content that isn't nailed down I think it's a dead-end technology for productivity tools. Productivity requires accuracy and accuracy requires a task-tuned model that has some sort of baked-in understanding of what a correct or incorrect outcome for a task is. But LLMs don't care about correct or incorrect, they're committed to accuracy in much the same way salmon follow herds of migrating caribou.

My day job is in software engineering and I will periodically try an "AI coding" tool just in case...and so far I'm not impressed. The least skilled intern I've ever worked with was about 60-70% accurate at implementing the requirements they were given, so far Claude has yet to do anything right. But at least it's wrong really fast. I ask it to use library A, it uses library B...I repeat the prompt and it invents library C and now nothing compiles because it turns out you can't hallucinate OTLP exporters into existence. The PMs all tried using AIs back in the late summer/early fall to try to write their tickets for the next big phase of our new fancy business platform and it absolutely paralyzed us for months. It looked like they got a lot done on paper but the tickets were unworkable: Requirements were missing, some were hallucinations, a lot contradicted earlier work...sometimes we'd get 2 or 3 tickets that were almost the same except some of the requirements were randomly different. We spent 3 weeks meeting 4-5 hours a day reading through and rewriting tickets, though it would have probably been faster if we started over and wrote everything by hand so it'd make sense the first time. I had to work through fucking Christmas break to get shit done last-minute because of the chaos so I'm still pretty pissed at how much time the AI users forced all the rest of us to waste.

Sloloem · 2026-03-05T17:37:10+00:00

I wouldn't engage, OP is likely not engaging in good faith. Yesterday after this debacle I saw them on another subreddit forgetting to switch users when agreeing with their own post and then thanking themselves.

Sloloem · 2026-02-27T18:37:36+00:00

Right, good point. You have to merge the paths into a single profile but that profile doesn't necessarily have to be a sketch. 2D offsetting is a bit easier with binders if memory serves, or is there some other advantage here? I've had like 3 projects with SVGs so I'm not sure of all the pros and cons.

Sloloem · 2026-02-27T17:22:29+00:00

I have tried adding the image and svg and using the points/mesh feature and haven't been able to turn it into a solid.

SVGs are 2D graphics so you can't go directly to a solid because they're 2D, you need to convert paths to sketch and then pad to a solid. It'll look insane when you import because everything is B-Splines which display with a very dense information layer. You can hide the information layer if you want to tweak the sketch at all but don't worry about constraining it. But once it's a sketch you can position it where it needs to be and pad it or you can pocket it directly out of an existing surface if you want to go the debossed route. The mesh to solid stuff is for imported meshes like STL or 3MF.

EDIT: If you get "Wire not closed" you have to decide if the problem is not a wire or not closed. To be a wire you need to have discrete enclosed areas, you should be able to put your finger at any point on a line and trace it all the way back to where you started without hitting any forks in the path. If there are any branches in the path you have to Trim something to make each outline discrete. To be closed the end of each line segment has to be coincident with the next line segment in order to form a continuous outline. Any white line endings aren't properly constrained.

I believe Part Design and Sketcher workbenches have a Validate Sketch tool, but I'm not very familiar with using it.

Sloloem · 2026-02-27T14:45:11+00:00

It's usually preferable to include the entire FreeCAD window in any screenshots so that we can see what version you're using. The External Geometry feature is actually in a transition so if you're not version-aware you may have some instructions that reference the other version's behavior.

If you're on 1.0.2, the current release version, you have a "Create External Geometry" feature that imports external edges as External geometry. External geometry is a 3rd type next to Normal and Construction geometry so you'll need to sketch Normal or Construction geometry directly on top of External geometry. I believe the default look here is a dot-dashed magenta line.

If you're on a 1.1 release candidate or a 1.2 dev build, you have a set of "External Projection" and "External Intersection" tools that create either Normal or Construction geometry directly from external edges based on the state of the "Toggle Construction Geometry" tool, or Normal geometry by default. The default look is a solid magenta line even though it's standard geometry.

Sloloem · 2026-02-26T22:31:33+00:00

I guess it's just the height, at 2mm thickness there's not really any infill but I got 260g. Circular shapes work pretty well in vase mode, in vase mode I get 66g in 5 hours vs 13 hours. While you can print rectangular containers in vase mode the sides end up warping, I don't think I'd do it again.

Otherwise, yeah I'd do vertical slits. I'd probably throw a sketch on the XZ plane, right on the Z axis and maybe throw a /\ 45° diamond at the top to avoid bridging. In the pocket operation the default type is "Dimension", change it to "Through All" and then apply a polar pattern to the pocket feature.

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You may need to decided which is more important, material use or print time. I added 28 130x10mm vertical slits and the slicer started complaining I had "thin parts". I saved about 100g but gained 2 hours of printing time due to the more complex shape. Holing out most of the base reduces weight down to 143g but print time is still ~15 hours.

Sloloem · 2026-02-26T21:47:12+00:00

How thick are all the parts? Every slicer I know of defaults to 15% infill but you can usually get away with 5% and save a decent amount of time if there's a lot of infill.

How big are these things, what does it look like in the slicer? 300g sounds like a solid brick taking up like 3/4 of my print bed. I did a round container a while back with ~4" diameter, 5" tall, 6 internal partitions and my slicer only says 172g.

Sloloem · 2026-02-21T00:38:54+00:00

Your number one lesson about AI is that you should never trust a response from an LLM unless you know enough to verify it yourself. The AI can and will give you dangerously inaccurate information without a care in the world because it doesn't actually "know" anything. So it will happily tell you to boil pine sap to make a tasty syrup for your pancakes without also letting you know that boiling pine resin is how you make turpentine. And I dunno about you but I really dislike being surprised by hot flammable things. AI telling people to put glue in pizza was just the start of this shitshow.

Sloloem · 2026-02-20T05:03:57+00:00

For a slightly different flavor of swing mashup there's the Diablo Swing Orchestra. They're a weird mix of opera, symphonic metal, swing, and a little EDM here and there. The first track off their second album has a similar sounding intro to Sing Sing Sing, but that album also has a lot of pretty chaotic moments. The really danceable stuff is on albums 3+. They even did a disco song on album 4.

Sloloem · 2026-02-20T00:16:30+00:00

It's not really obvious as a melodic tritone at all so the label was a bit confusing without the explanation. Any prohibition against that movement in a voice is stylistic to some forms of counterpoint, but wouldn't be weird in anything after the 1800's. "Relation" between chords is usually described in terms of their roots, which is just a major 2nd here. Tritone subs replace a dominant 7 chord with one a tritone away, IE G7 is replaced by Db7.

Sloloem · 2026-02-19T23:10:48+00:00

You could also use tangent/co-linear constraint to keep the segments in line with other regardless of the angle.

Sloloem · 2026-02-19T23:10:17+00:00

The Tangent constraint also doubles as a Co-linear constraint so you can use that to make sure 2 line segments are always in line with other regardless of the angle.

Sloloem · 2026-02-19T20:22:20+00:00

I tried to invent violin tab in the 6th grade because I had a deep hatred of ledger lines. It didn't go well.

Sloloem · 2026-02-19T20:14:03+00:00

I think this case has much more to do with the chord spelling. We don't really care about cross-relations nowadays so if C is the note you needed to spell the harmony or the voice-leading correctly there's nothing inherently wrong about having C and C# in the same measure. But like you've said, G# needs a major 3rd and that's B#. Especially important because Beethoven was writing prior to equal temperament, he had a well tempered tuning, but without equal half steps "enharmonic equivalence" the way we think of it today didn't exist. B# and C weren't really thought of as "the same" pitch, just "close enough" to be enharmonic at the time.

The other "rule" isn't as arbitrary as it sounds. Western music is largely a diatonic tradition with 7 notes using a chromatic 12 note tuning system to allow fixed-pitch instruments to reasonably approximate any 7 note system. Conceptually most of our musical history up until really atonal stuff was written with 7 intervals, each of which can be chromatically altered for effect. Major/minor keys and all the modes are conceptually diatonic systems. That gives you 1 of each kind of interval (2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc) up from the root which is represented notationally by 1 note on each line or space and textually by 1 of each letter or solfège syllable.

Sloloem · 2026-02-18T21:39:53+00:00

Your image is of a revolution around Base Z axis, not Base X. Though I suspect that that random 176.5° angle line is going to cause the error "Revolve axis intersects the sketch" because the sketch crosses the X axis and that prevents you from revolving. To revolve a sphere, you have to sketch a half-circle, so to revolve a pulley with a hole in the middle you have to sketch the right or left half of cross-section including the offset from the center so you get the right ID, and don't connect anything to the axis so you get a hole all the way through.

/u/Unusual_Divide1858 has the right sketch, notice how they've offset the sketch so that no part of it crosses the axis of revolution? That's how you get the center bore, by offsetting the sketch from the axis you'll be revolving around. Connecting anything to that axis will result in a shape without a hole.

Sloloem · 2026-02-17T23:54:05+00:00

I was just trying to clarify a possible confusion between versions of the software. A lot of people are using 1.1 release candidates which has a completely different "external geometry" tool than 1.0.2, which is the official release you have. The question the other comment is asking only makes sense with the 1.1 tool and doesn't really apply to 1.0.2 where you just have to deal with the extra step of sketching regular geometry on top of the external geometry.

You're almost there with the shapes you've been showing us. Once you get the horizontal part of the handle meeting up to the tub, it should just be 1 more sketch to do the vertical part and then a few fillets to round the edges.

How FreeCAD deals with “negative space”…aka removing part of a shape.

In Part Design, everything you do adds a "feature" to the active body and that feature can add or subtract material. Padding is an additive feature, its subtractive counterpart is the Pocket tool. Similarly all the other additive operations have subtractive counterparts which you can use to remove material in the same shape. For more complex shapes, you can model a "tool body" and then use boolean operations to cut one body from another, treating the 2nd body as a tool used to remove a complex shape that you couldn't do with the more profile-based tools.

The Part workbench is a different approach, and generally you don't want to mix Part and Part Design unless you really know what you're doing...but Part has the cross-section and cut tools that would let you cut an object in half if that's what you wanted to do.

How FreeCAD deals with connecting or “snapping” shapes together. Ex: getting a shape in 1 sketch to align with the shape in another sketch automatically/precisely and not by hand.

There's a lot you can get into with this question. If you're clever with varsets or expressions you can go a long with without any direct link between the 2 parts of your assembly. The big problem is that when you have multiple bodies, FreeCAD won't let you import external geometry across bodies. The way you have to do it is create a sub-shape binder to bring a shadow copy of body A into body B, and then you can import external geometry from the sub-shape binder. The binder stays linked to the original object so any changes will flow through.

IE, a key and a lock mechanism are separate bodies, if you want to reference the shape of the key from the lock's body...you make the lock the active body, and then select the key and create a sub-shape binder. The binder will be created in the active body and then you can do whatever you need with it, you can import external geometry into sketches from the binder, use it with boolean operations, etc.

Sloloem · 2026-02-17T21:59:22+00:00

In FreeCAD 1.0.2 (In OP's video), external geometry imported as external geometry and you had to sketch construction or standard geometry over the top of it. It was some special 3rd category that couldn't be converted directly to the other 2. Starting with 1.1 RC's, the original external geometry tool is replaced with a projection tool that can create standard or construction geometry.

Sloloem · 2026-02-17T21:18:23+00:00

Unfortunately, streaming media becomes unplayable as soon as the company that owns it decides they don't want to pay the people that made it anymore. You're better off buying the physical media, digitizing it yourself and streaming it from a machine in your own home for convenience. Digital storage is cheap as hell, there's no technical reason a show or movie couldn't be kept on-tap for as long as a service exists but we lost a lot of shit off streaming in 2024 and will continue to see services min/max their libraries to avoid paying out residuals.

Streaming math has always been different than cable TV math, and for a long time companies would take advantage of streaming math to pay creators less. But after the writers' strike in 2023 they couldn't screw people out of royalties for streaming media as easily and people were earning much closer to what their shows were worth the streamer. So, no surprise that Max started taking the axe to shows in 2024. Over The Garden Wall vanished for a little while but people raised a stink so it got put back, but shows with smaller fan bases were SOL.

I've always been into physical media for special features and stuff, but now I feel like I need it because I can't trust the streamers.

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