Hi Felix, re: shrink trimmed surface -

> but does it help down the line with other operations?

No, not typically - under normal circumstances it should not make any difference if you shrink surfaces or not.

It could occasionally happen that there would be some difference due to a bug or sometimes shrinking can actually kill off some badly formed area of a surface like some area where it's self intersecting or jumbled control points or something like that. If that happens, then it can make a bigger difference, like for example if you tried to do an offset and some not immediately visible area of jumbled control points will make the offset go crazy trying to track along a surface normal that is bouncing all over the place, but if that area happens to get removed by ShrinkTrimmedSrf, then doing an offset after that could produce a better result.

One side effect of shrinking is that it will reduce file size by some amount though, because it discards some extra areas of surfaces and that reduces data size by some amount.

Another side effect though is that you won't be able to do an "untrim" (delete trim boundaries) to recover the full original surface that was being cut up - sometimes being able to recover the original surface can help when trying to repair objects.


If you want the smallest possible file size, then I guess that's one reason to do it...


Normally I would not think that you would see any difference from doing it or not - the main exception is the Flow command from the first v3 beta which uses the full underlying surface. That's not the case with Flow in the latest v3 beta anymore though.


- Michael