let's quickly cover precision edge offsets
and 3d tolerances what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales where i'm
sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours
so don't forget to subscribe and hit that little bell icon to never miss an
opportunity to keep making doing an offset within a precision workflow
is almost common practice and yet it feels like it doesn't exist in
blender well i'm here to show you that it does
one is an add-on and one is a modifier so offsets within a cad workflow are
extremely used because this lets us compensate for
things such as laser kerf or for the shrinkage or
expanding of a 3d print so let me go about showing you how to do
this so let's say we're wanting to create a
stand for this weird shape so let's go ahead
and create just a little base model here so
we're just going to get a plane i'm going to go into edit mode of that
plane there make sure i just have oh i was already
in edit mode excuse me so let me delete that actually no i'll
just pop that out selection and now let's go into edit
mode select that plane let's scale it up a bit let's now move it
so it's there and i'm just going to bring it
up because what i'm going to be doing here is basically
doing a copy of this pasting this down and then i want to make sure that
this plane is up where it's completely solid so to speak so that's a good point
there and now i'm going to do my shift and
click there and control shift minus so now we have
our plane right here so let me just move that out so we've got this here
let's take this object now into edit mode and modify it up a bit so
we're not going to need these circles right here
let's go ahead and get those and now let's delete those
completely because those aren't needed and just for the sake of it i just want
the edge that we're going to be working with so let's delete
this outer cube as well so removing these vertices so we're left
with this so right this minute how would we go
about adding an offset of this because i know
that i want a little bit of wiggle room for the base that this is going to be on
i want a let's say 0.25 millimeters so
to do that we need to go into edit preferences
add-ons and make sure that we have mesh tools enabled so enable this one
this one comes with blender which is fantastic
and now what we can do is within edit mode
we're going to select all the edges here so that was an
alt double click left and now we're going to go into
edge offset edge offset and as you see right here we have
our setting that we're wanting so let's go
for our 0.25 millimeter offset fantastic and that's it it's as
easy as that now if you wanted you can make that an inset
as well by just going the other way around so let me just put that 0.25 once
again so here it is and i'll also show you
that this is in my experience
has been very very accurate so let's use our cad not archived
our blender measuring tool here i'm going to go edge and then i'm going to
go edge centers and let's go
place this here let's grab this and bring it down
and look at that 0.25 so in my experience
this offset has been extremely powerful and this
works brilliantly for laser cutting files because
that right there well you've just been given an offset so if you're wanting to
offset an item or a model really easily it's that way now that i've shown you
how to do some really accurate edge offsets let me show you how to do
tolerances and offsets with 3d objects i'm also
going to show you how to create the object
for the offset just in case you have a weird situation that you don't have the
object itself this is very similar to one of the
videos that we've already covered when we were doing
the boolean cut out so let's go ahead and do that
let's go here into the edit mode let's go into
face selection here's a new little shortcut which is the
alt and clicking on a face which will give you loop
face selection now if you do shift d to duplicate it we'll constrain it on
the y and now we're gonna do p for parting the
selection out of that object go back into object mode go into edit
mode of this object now we're going to go into edge mode
select this edge shift select that edge over there and
hit f now what's the thing that we've got to double check here
that would be the normals so now if i go here back into object mode and use my
quick menu to do face orientation remember that the face
orientation is here in the overlays and if you want
that shortcut you right click it to create it into the
quick menu which is the Q menu so face orientation yep the normals are
flipped so how do we go about fixing that
well we go into edit mode select it all and we're going to do
shift n for the shortcut of recalculate normals and now when we go and check
that it's going to be fine so how would we go
about offsetting this to make it smaller
because what i'm wanting to do here is that hole there
is exactly the size that i'm wanting for whatever reason and i'm going to 3d
print this and my 3d printer always creates things that are
0.35 millimeters too big so yeah we're working on a very small
scale here but still it applies so the way to do this is i
use the solidify now what solidify does i'm
going to change the offset to 1 and now when i increase the
thickness you'll see that the object gets bigger this is basically
a three-dimensional offset so if i were to go into x-ray you will see that
inside we still have our original object now to make sure that that
isn't there we can turn on only rim now only rim uses face normals
to calculate so if we were to put this to our offset of 0.35
of course this makes the our object 0.35 millimeters
bigger than it needs to be we're only doing it the other way around so to do
that we're going to change this offset to minus one
and there we have it now this is still the size of the hole
why is that that is because our only rim is calculated via the normal
so we have to flip the normals because what we're wanting
is what was inside the normal so flipping the normals
there is what we're wanting and something else to keep in mind is we
have to look for even thickness it changes the way that
it's things are calculated meaning that we're going to have a more
accurate result so turning this on that's the thickness that we're wanting
so let's go ahead and double check the accuracy because i
just want to show you what type of accuracy you get with this
so i'm going to be using card transforms here to move my object
so let's move this on the y over to there let's get nice and close now
and let's use our measurement tool what we're going to be doing is going from
edge center to edge center because that's the best way to calculate
an offset so let's go edge center to edge center
fantastic so this edge center to that edge center there let's make sure
that it's clicking the right one and there you
have it our offset is just a little bit off so
i just wanted to show you that that's the type of accuracy you're getting
i can't seem to get it more accurate than that i will show you a different
way of doing exactly what we've just done using our
edge offset but i just wanted to show you that the
good thing about this is that if all of a sudden you realize actually it needs
to be it's not 0.35 is only 0.3
so you can change this parametrically almost
to be able to see instant results of changes now the way that i would do
this alternatively to get perfectly what i'm
wanting is i would do this i would go into
my object i would select the hole that i'm wanting to fit into
i would duplicate this move it in the y so i only have the
edge that i'm wanting then i would pop out that selection
going back here into my edit mode i'll then
select that once again and use our edge offset edge right there i already have
this set to minus 0.35 fantastic and that there is pretty much
it in fact what i would like to do is just double
check this so we can look in here and select our
object here go one perfect and now we will use
our measuring tool once again going from the face
center sorry edge center to the edge center over there and you can see
that we're exactly 0.35 so now if we use our new edge here we know we're
getting exactly what we're wanting so let's
delete this edge select this edge f go into faces
now let's extrude this out fantastic there it is and now we've got to double
check because you never know oops we never
know what's going on with our normals there
they are so let's make sure that these normals are flipped correctly
so a shift n fantastic double check that brilliant and let's
just double check this once again so let's go into our
card movement g this edge on the y to there get nice and close up
once again oops uh that's not going to get me nice and close
and then here let's go ahead and do our measurement
so let's make sure that we're getting the right
place so there to there they have it 0.35
so that's exactly the size we're wanting i just wanted to show you all the ways
of doing offsets in case absolute millimeter accuracy is what
you're needing and that's how i would go about doing it
if i needed pure accuracy and usually especially when i'm doing laser cutting
i'm needing 0.01 margin of error
and that there is edge offsets and three-dimensional tolerances
within blender we're getting to a point where we're very close to have set
the very foundations of precision modelling and blender
and quite frankly from here on out i'm just gonna tidy up a couple of loose
ends we're going to finish this off and then
we're going to do some practical examples
and then go into some really advanced use cases
and of course a huge thank you to my patrons you're all awesome and i
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i would love to see you there too thanks for watching
keep making and let the quest continue