Andy -

Just my $0.02 worth of experience:

I try to avoid fillets on simple shapes because yes, they are difficult to un-do. Instead I'll first try to build the fillet into the construction curves.

In the case of the capped, shelled cylinder, you can draw a 2D profile curve, apply the 2D fillet, and Rail Revolve into a cylinder having a thick wall. The advantage is you can simply move a couple of points and re-do the Revolve to get a new fillet dimension.

I also tend to save making fillets to the very end of the model creation so I don't paint myself into a corner.

Another thing I do on more complex projects is take a copy of the objects when they are in a less developed condition and paste them off to one side (or into another instance of MoI) as backup to an earlier revision.

Ed Ferguson

Thanks Ed - good suggestions. Andy

Hi Andy,

re:
> OK, so your reasoning is that because it is complicated it won't happen in MoI?

No it's simply an explanation for why it has not happened _yet_ in MoI.


> Alibre Design has no problem with it - see screenshot. <...>

Yes Alibre Design uses a geometry library called ACIS which has had something like 50 more man-years of effort put in to developing the shell and fillet geometry processing than the library that MoI uses.

I would recommend using Alibre to do your shelling instead of MoI, that way you won't have to worry about the ordering.

Shelling in MoI is pretty primtiive. When I started MoI I had hoped that the shell and fillet functions in the geometry library that I used would improve over time but the authors of the library have gone in a different direction than that.

I would like to license a different library to better handle those areas. That requires a lot of work as well though even just to investigate it.


> it becomes more important IMO for the application to do what the user expects

I totally agree! Unfortunately it will require a lot of work to make this area behave like the user expects. I have not managed to scrounge up an extra 50 years of work time to make it happen as of yet.

- Michael