Hi Brendan,
> Is this indicating irregularities of the surfaces or merely depicting the object in 3D?
Well, it's not necessarily an error - what it is showing you are the edges of the result surfaces where they join to the adjacent surfaces.
In this case it is a result of having a rail curve that is a multi-segment curve. Several surfacing operations like Rail revolve and Extrude, will tend to generate one surface output piece for every segment of the input curves.
You'll be able to see the segmented nature of the rail if you use Edit/Separate on it, that will break it into individual curves for each of its component segments.
You can fuse segments of a curve together by turning on control points and selecting the point where they touch and deleting it - if you do that to some pieces of your rail curve you will then get less surfaces generated and have fewer edges in the result.
But having many edges is not necessarily an automatically bad thing, it just means you have a model made up of many surfaces that touch at common edges. It does not tend to be very good to have really thin slivery bits though, you may want to merge some segments together to simplify the rail structure a bit for that.
But looking at your shape, I think the other way that Burr shows for making a sweep around the outside area rather than doing the whole thing as a revolve is probably better for that particular shape.
Your shape is not really very "radial" in nature, because the curved parts are more at the perimeter of the shape rather than throughout it like a sphere or lathed thing (which would be more "rail revolve-ish").
- Michael
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