Follow Along: Creating Ribs

In this lesson, we will walk through how to create ribbing on this part. So you can download the starter file below this video, which has our inputs we’ll be using, as well as our part. In the file, we have this. We have it as an implicit body. We have the upper body and lower body. We have the lower face A that has different colors so we can see it: our upper face A, lower face B, and upper face B. So we will use these faces and show the CAD face method for creating ribbing, as well as the mesh method for creating ribbing.

So, in this way of creating our ribbing, we’re going to start off in the latticing tab, and I’m going to choose our Periodic Lattice and place that in my CAD face method. You could also search for your Periodic Lattice in the search bar. As we learned this in initial latticing, we’ll use a unit cell. We can choose the graph unit cell. I can also just double-click and select that graph unit cell. I’m going to use our triangular honeycomb unit cell. If I type “I” and then “Z” to see this centered in my viewport, you can see what that will look like. We’ll use this for our ribbing for our cell map. I’m going to have one for the lower ribs and one for the upper ribs. So let me type “I” again and begin with our lower ribs.

For the cell map, I’ll double-click and I can choose Cell Map from CAD Face. Also, you can choose that from our cell map options in the latticing tab. For the face, I’m going to choose our lower face A. So that’s just that outer face UVW count. I have that as our ribs division, so I can just drag and drop that. We have our offset distance, that input is going to be our height, and I’m going to have this as linear. So now we can see the cell map that we’re going to place each one of our cells. For the thickness, I’ll just drag and drop that thickness here. When I turn on this, we can see that triangular honeycomb unit cell was placed in each one of those cells for our cell map. I’ll right-click and make this a variable, which I’ll label as “lower ribs.”

So we’ll do a similar thing for the upper ribs. I could go through the same process, but if you know that everything except for that face is going to remain the same, what I can also just do is right-click, duplicate variable. Now, instead of the lower face A, I’ll take that out, save some space in my workflow by closing that. Let’s view the upper body and that upper face A. So the outer face. Now I’ll just drag and move that into here, turn on that lower ribs copy, and it gives me exactly what I want. So I’ll double-click on that name of the variable and label this “upper ribs.”

So now I have my lower ribs and my upper ribs, but none of these are connected quite yet. So the last thing that I’ll do is a Boolean Union where I will take my lower ribs, my upper ribs, and then I’ll add two more items in here so that I can also connect it to my lower body and my upper body. When I type “I” on this Boolean Union, we have one piece shown, and it has all of our ribbing on there. So I’ll right-click, make this a variable, and label this “Part B.”

So this walks through how I would use that Cell Map from CAD Face, and next we’ll show how to use a mesh method or multiple CAD faces to create a similar design. So this is our CAD body. So really just going to be starting with CAD faces, but if you had a mesh beginning with, you can use that too. This time we’ll use our lower face B and upper face B. So this is just the interfaces, and you can see that they are adjacent to each other, and I want to create one conformal ribbing throughout this entire two faces. I’ll put my cursor under the mesh method, and I’m going to use a CAD Face List to just have both of these in there.

I’m going to stitch them together, so I can search for the Stitch Adjoining CAD Faces by clicking on my part and using that context search and just type “Stitch,” and it’ll already place it right in there. So now instead of the two, let me turn off that visibility. I have just this one, and they’ll be treated as one face. However, our cell map on CAD face still, even though these are stitched, we would not be able to use this in that block. So instead, we’ll use in our cell maps. We have this Cell Map from Quad Mesh, and I’ll convert that to a quad mesh using the Quadrangular Mesh block. So you can go about this way, where we start from the innermost block and go outwards. You could also go the opposite way, where I double-click on the input and just keep on going from that cell map from quad mesh into the quad mesh into the mesh into this. But I’ll continue with this flow of starting from that inner block and going outwards.

So now that I have a CAD face, I then need to turn this to a mesh. So I’ll do a context search, and I’ll say Mesh from CAD Body, and we can see now it’s a mesh. The last step, I’ll click on that, do a context search, and use the Quadrangular Mesh block. So now I have all of these quads, which will be the basis for my cell map. We can see we get this warning that our output mesh is not closed. That’s fine. We are only using some faces, it’s going to be open anyway. I’m going to change my target count because if this is where I place each of these cells, I’m going to have a really small unit cell. It’s going to be very densely packed. So I’m going to change my target count to 100, and we can see I have a much larger start for my cells. So I’ll place this into our surface mesh. For our height, I’ll use that offset distance in our inputs again, and our layer count, I’m going to just use one. So you can see wherever I had those lines on my mesh, that’s where I’m placing those cells like so. I’ll right-click, make this a variable, it’s getting to have a lot of steps in there, and I’ll label this “cell map.”

Now I’m going to place my unit cell, my geometry, in there. So again, I can go to my lattices and choose that Periodic Lattice. So I can search for that. This is my cell map. I’ll double-click on that unit cell and choose the graph unit cell again. I’m going to choose as the unit cell the triangular honeycomb, and the thickness will be that thickness in the input. So now we have this inner ribbing, and just as we had done before, the last step of this process, first I’ll right-click and make this a variable and label this “conformal ribbing” or “conformal lattice.”

The last step is just to do a Boolean Union. So I’ll search for a Boolean Union block, place in my conformal lattice, and then I look at my CAD import and selections. I want to also union this to my upper and lower body. So I’ll add another item in my list, move the upper body and lower body variables into that Boolean Union. If I type “I” so I only see that, we can see I now have that conformal ribbing on the inside of this part. So I’ll right-click, make this a variable, and label this “ribbed part.” That is how we can create conformal ribbing using our Periodic Lattice and the Cell Map from Quad Mesh and Cell Map from CAD Face.