FreeCAD News

Spot­ted online, FreeCAD user Eri­ka Hei­di was keen to explore sketch­ing on round sur­faces using the Curves WB. As a fan of Star Wars her learn­ing project leaned into the idea of a desk­top death star as a small desk­top organ­is­er box. It’s a love­ly object and a great exam­ple of sketch­ing onto near spher­i­cal objects.

Eri­ka says;

“I have been using FreeCAD for a cou­ple years but only recent­ly I start­ed doing more things with it, par­tial­ly I got moti­vat­ed by the con­tests and com­mu­ni­ty at http://Printables.com. So I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with more com­plex things, and it’s being quite fun”

If you haven’t come across the Curves work­bench before it’s avail­able via the addon man­ag­er and con­tains a broad selec­tion of tools for work­ing with NURBS curves and sur­faces. It’s well described over on the FreeCAD doc­u­men­ta­tion and there are numer­ous links to tuto­ri­als on how to use the Curves WB tools. Eri­ka worked through these exam­ple tech­niques describ­ing the use of the SketchOn­Sur­face tool to map her com­plex sketch design onto the spher­i­cal surface.

If you are inspired to check out the Curve WB tools then there is also a huge thread full of infor­ma­tion on this bril­liant and use­ful work­bench over on the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty forum.

Eri­ka has pub­lished the .3mf file over on the Print­a­bles site and has includ­ed some good advice on approach­es to 3D print­ing this slight­ly tricky to print object. Huge thanks to Eri­ka for let­ting us share her bril­liant work.