Can't join surfaces

 From:  Michael Gibson
4345.17 In reply to 4345.16 
Hi Shaun, when I load your Again.3dm file, I can actually join all the pieces together there - no scaling is required.

But the result is not a solid - not because edges are too far apart though, but because one of the Network surfaces is badly formed and kind of crumpled together where it was squished to a pole point. That bad formation has made a really teeny tiny additional edge in your surface that will not get cleanly joined to the other one.

You can see it if you zoom in closely (you have to go in a fair amount, it's pretty tiny) to this area here:



If you go in a ways you can see the surface is kind of messy and folded over top of itself in that small area:



And the surface does not come to a single point - there is actually a little tiny edge in that spot:




So that surface is kind of mangled in that tiny area and that will prevent you from getting a clean join with it.

Do you have the curves that were used to create the Network? They don't seem to be in that 3DM model file - possibly the curves used to create the surface wandered apart from each other near the end where they should have all been coming to the same point - it is possible to get a kind of messy collapsed area when there is some wandering between the various curve endpoints in pole areas like that, try to make sure that the curves are all ending right at the same spot (turn on control points and edit the end of any as necessary) to then see if you can get a better quality surface.


The way I found that little tiny edge is that after the Join happened, I could see that the model was selecting all as one piece, so I knew that it was mostly joined together, but that there must be some open edge in it since the object type in the properties panel showed as "Joined srf" instead of as "solid". When this happens you then need to find which areas of the model are not joined, and there is a script that can help you with that. Set up a new shortcut key (I use the N key for "Naked edges") and for the command part paste in the script listed here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#SelectNaked

Then when you push the N key the naked edges will become selected, and if you don't immediately see which ones they are you can use the view reset to zoom to the selected objects to zoom in on it - that's how I found that teeny tiny edge in this particular case.

- Michael