Relative Offsets

[soulrider911 (Brady)]

So far, I am loving Carbide Create. One area that I think would be WONDERFUL is improvements to how offsets work, mainly the ability to have an offset retain its distance from the source. Fusion 360 is a great example of this user experience. In Fusion 360, when you offset a path, that offset is now “relative” to its source and will always respect its distance even when the source size changes.
Example Scenario:

Let’s say you sketch a 30mm circle and offset that path 10 mm. Now you have essentially a 30mm and a 40mm circle. You decide that the circle needs to be 20mm (10mm smaller than the initial sketched circle), once resized the offset stays “relative” 10mm away from the source. you now have a 10mm and a 30mm circle and the 10mm offset stayed consistent.

Why this is useful: I could think of several reasons. But this one comes top of mind. I use multiple bits often in my projects. For example, a roundover bit that needs a slight offset from the main pocket cut. If I need to resize the pocket cut I then have to re-offset any and all offsets.

There are situations in which you might NOT want this behavior, so maybe there is a way to have a “lever” or “setting” that a user can tick to choose "relative offset’ giving them the control to decide.

Cheers!

[mhotchin (Michael Hotchin)]

This is venturing into ‘parametric modelling’ - it’s a big enough change that the developers don’t see it happening soon.

Carbide Create V8 Beta

Probably not (or at least not now) for a couple of reasons: That heads into “parametric design” territory and if we do that, we need to look at how to make it clear to everyone why their design is changing “randomly” or why “it’s doing whatever it wants.” The document model doesn’t have a way to link a dimension in a shape to a variable, so this would be a huge change.

[soulrider911 (Brady)]

Thank you for the response. From an engineering perspective that makes sense. From a user perspective, not sure it does. I can totally appreciate this requiring model enhancements or “shifts.” However, I think we could both agree there is nothing “random” about this.

If the concern is how to communicate a feature to a user, no matter what it is, wouldn’t that just be the UX layer? Seems kinda unfortunate to not entertain features that might benefit users due to concerns over how to communicate said feature to a user. It seems there is already variable-like behavior in the core as a user can use “t” to reference the stock depth in the project settings. Maybe just expanding variables could serve as a potential solution here? I am confident there are probably other ways to solve this problem than going full parametric design. There are many tools out there that are not parametric but allow relational data and variables. Figma is one that comes to mind that is in a totally different field in addition to Fusion.
Thanks for your consideration.