Hi Nick
> With this I was getting problems during the trim process
> (to get surfaces). I kept getting voids or areas that got
> skipped over inside of the closed curves/letters.
Sometimes text can be finicky in several ways - fonts were really designed just for 2D page output and fairly often they can have some kinds of messy structures in them that cause problems in more elaborate 3D calculations like using them for intersection calculations and things of that nature.
But if you do have a font that is kind of messy (stuff like pieces broken into more segments than necessary or a lot more control points in it than necessary, etc...) it is often possible to clean up some of those situations using the Rebuild command, see here for an example:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3976.11
Also if Trim is giving you some problems you could also try some different techniques for generating the surface fragments - Boolean Intersection will also work and come to think of it, it may actually be easier for a kind of batch operation.
The way that would work is instead of projecting curves, you would instead extrude the letters out into solids that push through the base shape, and make the base shape an open surface (delete any end caps) instead of a solid, that looks something like this:
Then select the base surface, run Construct > Boolean > Intersect , and select the solid letters and push "Done" or right-click to finish that picking part, and then the boolean intersection command will keep just the parts of the base surface that are contained within the volume of the solid letters, leaving you with these pieces:
Then to thicken these, if you use Shell it will produce an offset of the surface, kind of making it follow the surface contour:
Extruding them will punch them out in one straight direction making a different kind of shape like this:
Then you can do boolean difference or union of those pieces with your main piece.
Not sure if that gives you anything you can use, but also next time that you run into some difficulty with a specific model try posting that model here and that will help me to be able to give you some advice for that particular situation.
- Michael
