Begginner needs help

 From:  Michael Gibson
6192.5 In reply to 6192.3 
Hi JM,

> Is there a way you would recommend to do this shape instead of how I have done it?

Well, that shape is kind of squiggling and bending around in 3D a fair amount, it's harder to optimize things like that with simple construction steps.

It would be easier if the ending shapes were flat planar shapes though, those kinds of ends can be capped easily with the Construct > Planar command. So one thing might be to make those ending curves to be flat planar curves first before building stuff off of them, that would just make for a kind of easier to manage form.

There are a couple of different ways you can finish off your current shape though, one would be to draw in a couple of large planes near the ends and then trim off the shape to those planes so that you would then have planar openings at the end to cap with Construct > Planar.

Also another way without altering the end shape would be to draw in a connecting line here:




Then you'll have some 4 sided regions on the ends, each of those regions can be filled in with a surface using Construct > Network and then select all those surfaces and run Edit > Join to glue them together to make a finished watertight solid, I've attached a 3DM model file result doing that, it should probably work for printing now.

Just be aware that the ends are not flat, that spot where I show the line drawn in above is a sharp crease between 2 3D curving segments, so the ends that I created are somewhat bent surfaces and not totally flat surfaces.

Hope this helps!

- Michael