Jeezz...
I've spent like 6 hours working on making this model into snap together parts.
One of the biggest challenges has been the single thickness surfaces that need to be doubled for production machining.
My engineering pod has an exhaust port on the rear that's hollow.
To draw that was a snap but to build in that hollow feature I had to cut the pod in two pieces, then repair the cuts and then start adding in "thickness's" to the drawings, single thickness walls and then create a method to attach them back together short of glueing them.
As shown the rear nozzle slips into the rear of the engineering pod.
The first frustration I've run into with Hex is that you can't simply "cut" a model and seperate the two sections without going through a lot of redundant vertices, points and polies.
Then there was the thickness tool...
Hexagon isn't happy with the use of the "thickness" tool after you have holed or grouped the parts. You have to weld anything you've done that to in order to gain back use of a lot of the surface tools and that means no going back.
That's a frustrating issue and major design flaw on the part of the techs but hey... It's free so I'm not gonna complain anymore.
Then there was the snap together, peg and hole issue.
Again, unless you have welded everything you can't use the "fast Extrude" or "Boolean" feature and that's a drag as well.
Fortunately however, the verticy operation makes the model semi-transparent so you can see exactly where you need to make additional vertices for the pegs and holes in the parts from the inside of the model.
I'm now working on the warp drive pylons and embedding them into the top of the engineering pylons and the engineering pod.
For that I have to work with the Boolean feature and then create some pegs.
After that I'll put the impulse crystal housing together and then the warp drives and deflector shields.
More as it progresses.
