FreeCAD: Quick and Easy Hexagon Mesh | Wrapped Around Cylinder | Tube

[@royw2]

Thank you! A very informative lesson! I added a perpendicular constraint between the construction triangle and the hexagon, then the math for the intervals becomes straightforward: 'HexagonDiameter 5 'HexagonSpacing 0.6 'HexagonIntervalX =HexagonDiameter * cos(30) + HexagonSpacing 'HexagonIntervalY =HexagonIntervalX * 2 * cos(30) Now just change the HexagonDiameter and HexagonSpacing (dimension of a side of the construction triangle) and the intervals automatically adjust.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Wow thank you for taking the time adding that detailed information. Really help enrich the learning experience. Thank you for the comment.

[@alexstone691]

Finally this was something i was looking for, i wanted to make my 3d printed walls lighter

[@stewartpalmer2456]

You have just taught a very powerful tool. Using a triangle to align another object. That will work with many shapes. Thank you. As usual, I was doing it the (a) hard way.

[@TheYear2525]

Your FreeCAD tutorials are awesome, thank you for making them!

[@MangoJellySolutions]

You're very welcome, Glad your enjoying 😊

[@a-091-l2j]

🤣"I'm using a very old slow machine" he says... I'm writing this comment while our new (very cheap) laptop does the cut around the tube! I'm 5mins into waiting for it to recompute. We might have gone too cheap with the laptop purchase... waaaay it managed it!

[@noahjoyner8232]

This video is freaking awesome, really helped to connect some neurons!

[@noahjoyner8232]

Just coming back, is there a way to map the surface without wrapping? Obviously that is what results in the need for exploding the cuts, and you can use some math to make it all work out, BUT either a way to fix the exploded cut faces so that they will be a complete STL files upon exporting or cutting off wrapping would be awesome, if you know of it.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

[@MangoJellySolutions]

I do have another video of a different method that may help. kzbin.info/www/bejne/a4GufpxjbcqipKM

[@ctcboater]

I think that (about 3:40) the upper side of the construction triangle should have been constrained horizontal to make the pattern symmetric.

[@rms-repairmainanseremban8403]

I really love your video, because you tell it word by word...tq sir

[@amilasilva7710]

This is awesome. Very powerful tools. Thank you. Learned many new things.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Glad it was helpful! And glad your learning 😁

[@multiforc271]

the explode option was very nice ! please point out more of these points, knowing about boolean operation is straight forward and well known, but the compound option was the extra step. looking forward to learn more about these tricky businesses.

[@christophs4052]

Thank you! This tutorial has saved me a lot of time :)

[@simduino]

Excellent video, as always very detailled and perfectly explained. I was looking for a way to make a honeycomb internal structure and this was the perfect answer. Especially the array funcion which I didn't know until now. Thank you for taking the time to show us the way.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Glad it solves your challenge and thank you for feeding back. Good to hear your enjoying them 😁

[@simduino]

@@MangoJellySolutions I subscribed to your channel because I find your way of explaining things very pleasant, no annoying background music, easy to follow with a pleasant tone of voice, clearly articulated, just like a proficient teacher should be. Keep up the excellent work!

[@matwyder4187]

Just installed the honeycomb macro a few days ago. It works fine, but doing it manually allows way more freedom that could come handy at some point. Learned something neat again, thank you sir! With an extra construction triangle I managed to constrain the sketch and used references directly from there for the array intervals so the pattern is parametric and perfectly laid out. Matching the circumference to make it seamless is a bit trickier, couldn't yet find a straightforward way to do it.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

It's always good to try it yourself rather than relying on other people's macros, also it opens up the opportunity to use other geometry. Making it parametric is a great way to go. As you say you need to calculate the gap as well as the amounts of shapes across the unwrapped face which would be the csame as the circumference.

[@colinwakefield3940]

Thanks!

[@antondoorman5214]

Hi It's another great and clear explanation, I'm starting to find it more and more clear and interesting. Thank you

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Great to hear, thank you

Nice feature. Thank you!

[@TrollFaceTheMan]

Very useful, thanks!

[@donstelfox6921]

Excellent, thank you. Cheers

[@sjn8099]

Only great. Thank you 🙂

[@racingprincipal]

Thank you for this. How do I use it if I would like to honeycomb pattern in a part design, for example, the lid of a box

[@Dr_Mauser]

This will be useful, I need to model some expanded mesh to emulate a paper humidifier wick. Although that might be trickier because I would need to make the hexagons (Diamonds actually in this case) oblique.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

If I have it pictured in my head you could make the flat mesh and Extrude this in part along another sketch which is just a straight line at the angle and distance you want to travel. Or use make face from part on the hexagons rather than extruding. Do this twice and create a multi Ioft from curves workbench between both. You can position the second face were you want to make the desired angle.

[@Dr_Mauser]

@@MangoJellySolutions Yeah, I can see that first one easily enough. I printed a home humidifier I designed, but the one weakness is the paper "Wick" I used from standard humidifiers. Those fail from mineral buildup in a month or two from conventional use, but my design uses an aquarium pump to pour water on them from the top like some of the "Permanent wick" models. So far so good, but after four or five months, they get a little slimy from being constantly wet. I figure a plastic one I can safely wash without destroying is a better solution. (The permanent ones are made from expanded aluminum foil, coated with some kind of material that helps retain water on them, but they are delicate and cleaning them can damage them). You've probably seen conventional expanded steel, where a sheet of steel is given alternating slots, then stretched to give the mesh pattern to it. Typically that is flattened. The wick material tends to bend upwards as it is stretched. I think a similar material is used instead of wooden lath to support plaster or stucco walls. The wicks use that technique with absorbent paper, and form it around a single foil layer as well. That is trickier to model because the angle they would extrude is different at each segment. But if I can just approximate it that should be enough to hold the water in the airstream to evaporate.

[@LeszekZalewski]

Damn that's a good vid! Thanks!

[@ChocolateOz]

I tried to add thickness to the wrapped mesh around the tube at 21:45 but Freecad tells me that my ': list index out of range' and won't compute the thickness, as far I know I followed what you did exactly, and it gives me that error - what am I doing wrong?

[@luxmatic]

@mangojellysolutions - same issue for me yesterday. I did open an issue in GitHub, but I've no idea when or if it'll be fixed. Are there alternate approaches?

[@Not-Only-Reaper-Tutorials]

*P.H.E.N.O.M.E.N.A.L.!* It was the thing I was looking for, for more than 2 years! Thank you for that. Just I'm wondering if it works on more complex surfaces like a cilinder that a certain moment changes its shapes becoming conical. Wrapping the mesh around it. 23:36 because I adopted differente measures, I got that the removable objects are less than the ones I can remove. I got exactly 4 but I could remove only 3.

[@noahjoyner8232]

It does, I was looking for this video to wrap it a hex pattern around conical slice and it worked perfectly!

[@gregwoolley]

Another excellent video, thank you! Any suggestions (possibly an instructional video) on how to fillet the edges of the mesh, without manually filleting each mesh individually?

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Thank you. Yeh this world be a bit of a pain to fillet. With the tube I don't think you can get around it without selecting the edges. With the planner mesh on the other hand you can use lattice 2 and create a single hexagon, fillet and then lattice. I am sobering now if you can apply the same techniques to a tube. 🤔I will have an experiment. 👍

[@hoomanBeein]

Awesome tutorial! But I wanted some more precision with distances between the hexes(damn perfectionism). I created a spreadsheet where I put the diameter and the length of the triangle side and then referenced them in the sketch using formula. Afterwards in the array Intervals also had formulas referencing spreadsheet values so it was calculating distances automatically and more precisely then me adding 0.1mm and checking if it looks good.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Sounds awesome 👍

[@brianprice7020]

I , also, use spreadsheets to vary parameters of parts to see the success or error of my concepts.

[@martincronje5242]

Is it possible to wrap more complex shapes around another. The example in your video has a constant thickness, but sometimes there a need for thickness that are not constant.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Good question, if you had a shape that say has a series of bumps and hollows but following a similar curvature then you can follow the same process but at the last step hide the cylinder / tube and perform the cut against the target object. Your looking at how the hexagons flow and using a simple object first then cutting against the more complex object can be enough to create the effect you need

[@nams37]

Thank you

[@TechieSewing]

Great tutorial! I have a more general question after following a lot of lattice2 tutorials where you always use Part. If I'm going to use Lattice2, Curves and Draft in my workflow, should I forgo PartDesign and switch to Part? I've started with PartDesign and comfortable in it but lately it seems to hinder me constantly.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

So this is a good question. Part and part design under the hood are basically the same in how they end up creating a solid, and that's the key thing to remember "a solid". Where the part design breaks down is to create a faster workflow your operations need to create a solid as each time as they are automatically fused with the previous operation. The part workflow requires this to be done manually. This allows freedom of creating surfaces, shells and what I find the most useful of all, compounds, collection of objects. The lattice relies heavily on compounds as it uses arrays of objects. A text string can be exploded in part wb, isolating the individual letters, a extrude with a sketch that has 4 seperate rectangles though is one extrude is still a compound. Part design is great for straightforward modelling especially when you have a plan, but it breaks down when you want to the 'tricky' side of things as it requires all geometry to touch reducing its flexibility . It's funny you should bring this up as I just finished editing a video on that exact subject 😊

[@TechieSewing]

@@MangoJellySolutions That makes sense, thank you! Since I've learned we can extrude sketches in Part all the same and don't have to carefully cut spheres out of cubes, it doesn't seem as different. Haha, you are reading thoughts again :) Looking forward for that video too!

[@Not-Only-Reaper-Tutorials]

I tried to wrap a mesh around a box. I needed to wrap it around that. But it seems that it doesn't get the 3 faces I selected. It choses only one. I tried also with an extruded face form a B-Spline but the width was 0mm ... Im' stuck on these

[@MangoJellySolutions]

The box you would need to do each face independently of each other. The thing is as you found the interlinking of sides. Guessing you want a nice clean transition so these need to link up correctly. You could use a shape binder and Extrude the hex mesh for all sides. May be worth playing with path arrays. Looks like I need to experiment.

[@Not-Only-Reaper-Tutorials]

@@MangoJellySolutions thank you. It's really tricky. Also when you use B-Splines to create a face, it doesn't work with the wrapping (at least: to me. But I'm not knowledgeable like you are, so certainly i wrong steps). I'm getting crazy. P.S. Following your tutorials I was able to make things that were not imaginable to me before. Thank you so much for this.

[@Not-Only-Reaper-Tutorials]

@@MangoJellySolutions I tagged you in the forum and I uploaded the surface (it's a solid but I need its surface) to be meshed in the way we're talking. So this should be more understandable.

[@wilfriedpichler1]

Thank you, excellent video, in my case after following all the steps in the end with the cut operations i get a Failure: "Boolean operation failed, Tube is not a solid. I#m using the version 0.20.1 revision Nr. 29410 on Windows 10 . Any idea why this happens?

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Could you tell me which cut is failing. Was it the first one where you cut away the compound extrude from the sphere? It may be that you need the sphere slightly larger.

[@wilfriedpichler1]

@@MangoJellySolutions I tried the whole thing once again and now it worked out. Thank you!

[@wilfriedpichler1]

@@MangoJellySolutions it was the cut from the tube, didn’t work the first time.

[@henrymach]

What about isogrid? Any shortcut to make isogrid?

[@sleepib]

Just draw triangles instead of hexagons.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

The grid pattern is open to any sort of geometry. The curves workbench has an iso curves that you can add to your surface but that's all it is. I am experimenting with this to see what else can be done with it.

[@michaeltodd3920]

Can this be done on a tapered tube, kinda like a golf ball basket?

[@paulcole1171]

Hi just wondering if you can help when I go to the part section and click on the tube it come up with the measurements in the task window but what I have noticed is that when you use the Measure Distance tap the measurements show double the size for the Outer & Inner Radias than in the Task window but the Height is spot on so am I doing something wrong in the setup or is there a fault in the software.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

I've seen this before when measuring part design and it confused the hell out of me for ab hour. What I found is that when I rotated my view the measurement had connected to a point in space behind so it was off in the distance though it looked like it was aligned . Found clicking on a vertexes when measure helps. I don't know if this is the same issues as what you are having.

[@poco9964]

How would I go about putting a bottom and rim on top of this?

[@eggie3797]

Brilliant I have some more projects for you LOL

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Lol, I will be preparing for an email soon 😁😁😁

[@Reelalitybytes]

I’ve followed this very closely but for some reason (I had it working before) when I Boolean cut I still see the initial extrude present. Can’t understand why!?

[@MarkFraserWeather]

I've found the mesh looks slightly better if you use -0.32 x & 35.2 y for the Interval Y. No idea where these dimensions are measured from.

[@MarkHivosk]

thank yu

[@floriangerstl2954]

in Freecad 1.0 when trying to add thickness to the "wrapped around tube" hexes I get lots of "invalid final face" errors... is this a known issue?

[@vipos1062]

+1 same issue

[@alexandr-spb]

you have not shown how to make an indent equal to "n" in the array.. if the thickness of the hexagon is 3 mm, then how to avoid guessing and set the thickness to 3 mm?

[@HumanBeingSpawn]

How do you make it fill so it creates a connected mesh? It doesn't seem to work for me with rectangles. When I select the Array first for cutting, I end up with the pattern and a cutout which I do not want. When I select the Extrusion first, I get an error (exclamation mark on the extrusion). Also, I get an error when I switch to the Draft view.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

You have to size the repeated mesh just right to hide the seams. There are no magic bullets and if you want to fill a cylinder with custom shapes, the size of the shape must be something that perfectly matches the circumfence of teh wrapped object after being repeated N times where N is some integer. Generic case is called discrete mathematics and it gets really complex really fast.

[@Shenanigans3D]

Your reading my thoughts again... 🤣

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Lol... I think I might have to start doing the lottery!

[@beingabdaal950]

Can you help me create a cad file I failed doing it horribly

[@FEACAD]

Commendable

[@KnotHead1008]

👍👍👍👍

[@malzbier1339]

👍🏻🥳

[@w.binder-freecadchannel]

Everything crooked and crooked🤨

[@craftminerCZ]

Thanks but there's so many issues with this approach... The guesswork required to place another layer in the "correct" position is inaccurate. Calculating that is a lot of decimal digits due to the square root of 3 being irrational - also possible inaccuracies there. Not to mention if you make more than just a couple of hexagons, the entire app freezes up and refuses to budge or straight up crashes. This software, despite probably powering a lot of our progress, is seriously underpowered for how unwieldy it is. Nonetheless, the tutorial was actually quite good!