Implement sacrificial layers

[pierreporte]

Rule 3.4 from the article written by @Rahix

Sacrificial layers are very useful to reduce the need for support. This addon should provide a way to make them. The user must be able to specify layer height.

[redPanther]

For my understanding for this you just select the edges of the hole and then press the pad button, type 0.2 and ready - or just reduce the hole depth by - 0.2 in the first place. How can this plug in speedup the process? Did I miss something?

[pierreporte]

@redPanther it is not necessary a hole and the zone to fill with a sacrificial layer may not be circular.

[Rahix]

What @redPanther says is indeed true. You can select an arbitrary loop of edges on a part and then pad by 0.2mm to make a sacrificial layer. The downside of this approach is that the resulting feature will of course be very geometry dependant.

I think the only useful tool we could still provide on-top would be one that takes a pocket feature and creates a pad right at the bottom of the pocket. The pad then serves as a sacrificial layer for supporting any holes reaching further down.