It's been awhile since I've done any real personal design work, especially CAD work. I've never been that great at using CAD and have looked into "optimal" practices when drawing something up in the computer on and off over the years. Some examples of questions I've had are like what order should different bodies be created; when should we fillet on the sketch first or after the extrusion on the edge, how to create effective "dynamic" designs that change with parameters, the best way of creating either movable or rigid joints between objects, good flows for large multi-part assemblies, etc. There are always more questions the more I see other designs online and the more I personally design.
I've definitely picked up tips along the way like using boolean intersection and cuts more often (e.g. for making tabs), using a dog-bone plugin for modifying sharp internal corners for CNCing, and other more general workflow optimizations. But in the end, just CAD'ing more is the best practice for being faster and identifying poor workflow; if possible, manufacturing the design after CAD is even better as you quickly learn what is and isn't possible to make with your tooling (my time with my crappy CNC has taught me a ton).
But back to just CAD'ing more; I had some free time recently and decided I should try to CAD my glasses for some practice. Using only a simple ruler for some basic measurements (so I was designing near the right order of magnitude) and the judicious freedom of my eyeballs, I whipped up this model:
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| Perspective top view. |
I modeled half of the glasses and then mirrored everything at the end for the other half. I started off with the lenses. I created them by creating a spline for the front facing outline of the lens, then created a series of arcs and lines for the top down outline of the lens. I extruded both profiles, and used a boolean intersection to get the final lens. For the groove around the edge of the lens that holds the wire holding the lens to the frame, I sketched a groove into one side of the lens, then lofted the profile as a cut all the way around.
