Explode the parent components and then deal with them. Frankly for something as simple as this, I would just delete the seat parts on the right and use Push/Pull to extend the ones on the left. I wouldn’t have modeled them as just half in the first place to save myself some work. I would have made them the final length from the beginning. I think less work is more elegant.
Thanks for your open word. But the model is only a simple example. I like to find the best practice for left-right-symetrical solids in general. And of course in a real life model, the complexity is higher.
I like to know if those ingredients “nested components”, “mirroring” and than merging sub components is generally a bad idea and should be avoided?
Thanks for answer too. But hiding is not an option for me. Because I need to use OpenCutList to get a list of all parts.
My post is not about that individuell modell and a single task, not a search for a workaround. I’m looking for the “best practice” in general - in this case regarding mirroring of left-right-symetrical solids.
Copying and flipping left and right components is good practice. I do this whenever I’m modeling furniture that is symmetrical. Here’s a simple model of mine. The components that have left and right counterparts are flipped along the red direction to mirror them. The components like the top, drawer fronts, backs, bottoms and rails that run side to side were each modeled as one part.
The seat slats aren’t left and right components, however. If you want them to be one piece for a cutlist, anyway, the simplest thing is to model them that way to begin with.
Set up keyboard shortcuts for the Flip Along commands to speed up the process.
Thanks for your advice Dave!
I will follow it in the future. (By the way, that was my first choice in past exercises
Shortcuts: I have one for the extension TIG mirror yet
I use shortcuts for almost everything which is needed often.
Just to finish the theme:
If, in other situations, I have nested components which have to be merged, because there’s for the reason of a higher complexity no easy workaround:
How can I do that please?
I created a reduced testcase for that issue.
component 1.1: big cuboid
component 1.2: small cuboid
component 1: both cuboids
The components you want to merge need to be in the same context. That is they need to be inside the same parent component. It would probably be smarter to avoid the nesting in the first place until afterward. Generally in my models I only find a need to create nested components of assemblies such as frame and panel doors and drawers. Usually other nesting just makes more work in my modeling.
If you had followed my suggestion previous and deleted the slat components on the right side, edited one of the left hand ones and made it twice as long, your cutlist would show 8 seat slats at the correct length and you’d have less effort involved in creating the model.
A note about the native Solid tools, they convert the components they modify into groups. In the case of your model, using a tool like Union or Outer Shell would result in each slat being a group and no longer instances of the same component.
A better option if you must model only halves of parts like that is to use Union in Eneroth Solid Tools instead. It respects the components. You only need to copy one of the slats to the opposite side, though.
@DaveR
So many helpful hints! Thanks a lot. My first wrong assumption was, that merging two components will result in a new component (with a new name).
Especially the function “union” of the extension from Julia sounds very interesting.
I like to learn more and more skills to “repair” models, which are far from perfection. And not only methods “how to model in very good way from the beginning”. Both is useful.
I created a minimal model to make it easier for readers to see how the extension “Solid Tools” with it’s function “Union” works for the task. It is so nice, that the merged components are not replaced by groups.
I would even say: Only with Julias extension the method “start modelling with a half of furniture with a right-left-symmetry” makes sense.
