How to clean up messy geometry from a file?

 From:  Michael Gibson
9208.3 In reply to 9208.1 
Hi Chris - one thing that's a little confusing is I'm not sure the original model was completely accurate to start with either - one spot looks like this with part of what I think is a sphere cut away slightly from the sphere's pole:




And then on the other side it's missing the pole on the other side leaving some of the flat front face over:



Do you want to try and true up those things too?

A couple of quick first steps would be to identify areas that are all planar and replace them with single planes. You can do the replacement by deleting a set of coplanar triangles to leave a hole and then using Construct > Planar to seal it off with a trimmed plane. Here's an example:



Repeat that with any planar spots. Then the next steps would be that clearly some spots are circular like the feet, use Draw curve > Circles > 3 points to put circles on them, pick the 3 points onto 3 vertices somewhat evenly spaced (make them more like an equilateral triangle, not just 3 points all right next to each other). Also do any spots that should be arcs with 3 point arcs. I'd say do those along the bottom to make the bottom face, extrude those upwards to make the sides, revolve the tops of those by 90 degrees to make the upper corners. Then a last extrude or loft across the top.

Let me know if any of that doesn't make sense.

- Michael