Hi Rob,

> N sided Patch sounds like the answer, any ideas on when
> this might emerge? Is it a V3 thing or a V4 thing?

I hope it will be a V3 thing, but it is hard to know for sure - it can be a rather finicky thing to make work well, some of the typical mechanisms that are used for it tend to be rather prone to making oscillations in the surface.

But also it looks like there is a good possibility for me to license a 3rd party library to help with this.


In the meantime the way you would generally go about it without that is more like the following.

If you want to get a result with an irregular wavy filled piece, like for example this:



Build the wavy part as an extended sheet, using a surface construction tool like Network or Sweep (here I used Extrude with "set path"):




Then make your base shape a big extended block:




Now select the block, and run Boolean difference, and pick the surface as the cutting object. The block will be carved into 2 pieces:



Delete the upper piece and you will be left with the result:




Even when there is an n-sided patch tool available in the future, it can actually be better to use this method when it is possible, you just get a lot more direct control over the surface shape. The n-sided patch kind of cooks up something automatically for you and there can be a variety of difficulties with it, sometimes it is hard for an N-sided patch to pull the fitted patch to a tight tolerance of the input curves if you have a detailed hole boundary with a lot of segments... But when you do it by surface intersection as shown above that guarantees a nice join between the results.

- Michael