slop-cad

Appearance

A second body ​

Short. A second body is a second solid: you can hide it on its own, and boolean it against the first.

1. Add one ​

Start from anything with a solid, or press Example and extrude it 10.

In the Timeline, press New body.

A new row appears, labelled Body 2, and it is now the active sketch. You are back in the sketch view with an empty canvas.

2. Draw something separate ​

Press R and draw a rectangle clearly off to one side of the first one, so the two do not overlap.

Extrude it 10.

Switch to Model. Two shapes, each in its own colour.

3. What happened ​

They are two solids, and the Bodies panel lists both.

Check it:

  • Click the eye beside Body 2. It leaves the view, and the volume under the Timeline drops to Body 1's alone. That figure is the total of what is shown.
  • STL exports what is shown, so hiding one is how you export the other on its own.
  • The picker under the list booleans them: join, cut, or keep only what they share.
  • Click Body 2's name to rename it, and the swatch beside it to paint the whole body.
  • Tick a few rows and move them into a group, which folds them into one line with one eye. See the bodies list.

The different colours are per-feature colouring, a visual aid for telling which feature contributed which material. Bodies and colours are separate things: one body can be several colours.

4. What it is good for ​

Genuinely useful when a part has two masses that both build up from the base plane and are joined by something else, or that touch each other.

Two feet of a bracket, a base plus a separate rib, a part with a detached-looking boss that is joined lower down: all of them are reasonable.

5. Where it bites ​

Overlapping material. If features inside one body overlap in a way the modelling step cannot resolve, the whole build fails. The Timeline shows Body build in amber and you see the separate pieces instead of a finished solid.

A combine costs a hair of volume. Two solids that touch on a face have that face parted by a few microns before the boolean runs, since faces that lie exactly on each other are what the modelling step cannot resolve. Expect a millimetre or so of volume either way on a part of ordinary size.

Editing a combine. Every combine is listed under the picker in the order it is applied, and removing one puts the body it consumed back. They cannot be reordered.

Exclusive-or. Not offered. Compose it from a join and a cut.

6. Removing one ​

Two ways, and they remove different amounts.

The × on the Body 2 row in the Timeline removes that sketch and its extrude. This cascades to anything sketched on its faces. The first sketch cannot be removed this way, so it has no ×.

The × on a row in the Bodies panel removes the whole body: every sketch that builds into it, and any combine that named it. The last body is refused, since a document is always at least one sketch.

See the document model.

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