This one has me stumped. I often will spend a lot longer trying to figure something out than it would have taken me to redraw the object.
I have a bank of drawers, it is one piece split into three equal sizes. FredoScale seemed like the tool to use to resize this without messing things up so I proceeded to get a Sketchucation account and go through the steps to enable that extension.
I’ve watched a YouTube video on how to use the tool, and in his example it worked fine, it stretched his cabinet and didn’t affect the sizing of things, he was happy and moved on..
I’ve tried a few things and some are close to working but I haven’t gotten it yet. The forum has been good to me so I hope despite this being a question about an extension, the community can help out.
The goal would be to resize the box so that it is still equally divided into 3 sections while preserving the size of the plywood that makes up the box and the sides of the drawers. Reveal lines to remain 1/8" between the drawer faces and 5/8" at the outside edges. I will upload the model after posting this and in the model it would be the bank of drawers under the model version furthest to the right. You’ll see the space I am trying to fill.
I apologize if this is a silly question or is impossible, I felt like I was very close and maybe missing something small, any advice is appreciated!
Scaling the entire cabinet with the drawers is really not the best way to go about it. If you only had one column of drawers there are ways to get around it but with the three drawers as you have them modeled, scaling isn’t going to do the job you need.
You can use Box Stretching from the FredoScale set to do it.
What is your plan for the model? How will you using it? As it is now it looks like your plan is to whittle the drawers out of big blocks of wood. I doubt that’s what you really want, though.
Well, using Box Scaling would be the wrong tool for the job. Box Stretching would work to a point. It won’t do it all in one step. Modeling it the correct size in the first place would probably be the best option, though.
I would have expected to see the case and drawer box parts modeled as individual components representing each part you’d make in the shop. Maybe that’s still coming.
I had gone as far as making the case a component, the drawers were each components, and the faces were components. I had the faces and drawer boxes nested and under a different forum topic you helped me work through making the dynamic component containing both elements move correctly. (When I had the component selected it was moving weird but once I clicked out my programming worked as intended.) Thanks again for the advice over there.
All of that to say this is my own style of hybrid/lazy modeling. I work with a CNC guy who cuts my sheet goods for the cabinet boxes and he does all this breakdown work himself. I present him with overall dimensions in a layout created pdf and he runs it through his program. He sends his calculations back to me for a double check and once I give him the go ahead he’s spot on. For us we need to know the size of the drawer face that we’ll make and finish in our shop, and the drawer box size for ordering those. We will put it all together at our shop with the other wood components and ensure a tight fit with everything, then pass it off to our install crew for on site fitting and final installation.
Eventually when we have CNC in house I will likely do the breakdown of the boxes myself like we used to when we cut it all here at our shop on the saw. Then input the information from open cut list or something like that for the CNC cutting. I’ve never operated a CNC so I’m not even sure if that workflow would be possible with filetypes etc.
Dynamic Components is the best option, but requires very advanced table-based programming skills.
There is an extension with such ready-made Dynamic Components (some free and some paid) - 3DSHouse; very powerful, and DCs are very well made, i’ve used them for some time.
That is incredibly interesting. I would love to say my DC skills are good enough to try that programming but I sometimes still struggle with basic animation so putting in the required code seems outside my current skillset. I will look into that extension and see what would be useful for us. Thanks for sharing.
