Rail revolve Problem

 From:  Michael Gibson
3185.4 In reply to 3185.1 
Hi Oliver, yeah I think that eric is correct above.

Just to clarify, it appears that the axis you picked was not centered, it was shifted towards this direction:



So that caused a kind of compression to happen in the areas along that side.

If you pick the axis to be centered in that shape you should get a much better result.

But also along with eric I would suggest using Sweep for shapes that have a more rectangular aspect to them rather than rail revolve.

The reason why is rail revolve has a centralized pivoting and radial nature to it, which will involve a kind of stretching aspect to the result if your path is not of uniform size in all directions, something like this:



For some things that may be fine, but I suspect it is not really what you would want for your case.

A sweep on the other hand moves a profile around the path and rotates it around the local point on the path instead of only from one center pivot point. So sweep does something like this instead:



That's probably more what you would want because the profile shape is not being stretched, it is staying the same size as it slides along the path.

But note that with sweep the size of the profile curve should not be too large for the turns in the path - if it is too large it will cause things to get bunched up and cross over each other.

Also for doing something that has a rounded corner type shape you may want to just draw a regular sharp cornered box and use Fillet on it to round the edges.

- Michael