Draft/Taper Diagnostic Shader for Manufacturability Analysis

Most injection molded plastic or metal components need draft or taper in order to be easily removed from the molding tool. You may be familiar with the issues involved if you have ever pulled a popsicle from a popsicle mold. If the mold is minimally tapered you might need to be more delicate removing the popsicle.
Different materials and surface textures require varying draft angles to be designed into the tooling.

DraftCheck.blend (1.61 MB)



Attached is a draft shader that shows draft safe faces and areas in a mesh. This allows an industrial designer to visually tweak the mesh for manufacturability. As you can see the draft angle can make a noticable difference to the original shape. The node math seems to break down at larger angles. Any thoughts on making this shader more accurate and robust- abilty to align to different orientations etc: would be helpful.

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Cycles shader expertise would be much appreciated.

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Modification from Omar Ahmad- works great. At some point it would be worth adding some gradual gradientsbut this works great for showing unsafe areas that can be edited with some point wrangling.

DraftCheck_001.blend (1.62 MB)


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