Hi Brian,

> 1. How would I ever able to "pre determine" the "faults" within my
> work that you show?

Well, any time that you just sort of free-form position 2 pieces nearby each other without a snap, that will tend cause this kind of problem.

So unless you have snapped things together, it is best to assume that these faults are present.

The way to avoid them is to use snaps to ensure curves are locked in and touching each other before building surfaces from them.


> Do I allways have to find out what does not work and then
> go back to fine tune analyse?

No, it is much more efficient to use snaps from the beginning.


> BUT that adds the questions of the detail of the whys and
> hows of the specific "modifications" you made to my original file?

Well, I did quite a bunch of little edits. I went through and duplicated some edge curves from your original file so that I would have a shape closely matching it, then I dragged pieces that looked like they should be locked together with "end" snap so that they were exactly locked together, I used Edit/Trim to snip off a few ends that were kind of shooting over an axis line so that the curve stopped right on the axis line, I turned on control points and used Transform/Align to line points up that were wandering around a bit.

I did all of this to half of the curves, then used mirror to make the other half.

To smooth out the kink between a few joined pieces, I used Edit/Trim to cut pieces back from the kink area to make some space there, and then used Construct/Blend to put in a smooth piece. Several surfacing commands such as Network can build one surface if you have a smooth curve, but will build a creased multi-surface output if your curve framework also has a crease (sharp corner) in it. Also another way to smooth out a crease is to use Join and then turn on control points and select and delete the point where 2 segments touch one another. I did that in a couple of spots as well.

So that was a lot of little edits kind of wrangling things, aligning bits that were wandering around instead of all in one plane, smoothing out junctures between pieces, trimming off excess bits that were sticking out beyond an axis line, ...

- Michael