I'm sorry to keep bothering you, but it's happening again.

My co-worker decided to change the size of the circle at the bottom. So I went back to my original curves for the bottom and repeated all the sweeping. I left the network on top alone. But now when I try to create a solid with the scaling process I can only get a joined surface, not a solid.

Nothing can be overlapping because it's all built from the same curves. Here is the new model with the modified bottom.

Well, I just got the shape I wanted but not from the previous method.

I was able to select the circle at the bottom and then the other horizontal curves and sweep them using the vertical profile curves as rails. There is some weirdness at the top where the sweep ends but the mold maker can sand that out.

While it looks like this project will work with sweeps I'm sure I'll need to use networks in the future.

thanks again fo your time helping me.

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

That script will be handy. Thanks again for all the help.

I really like this program. I'm more of a 3D max guy, but lately I've been helping out our engineering dept. when they need organic modeling. MOI has been very useful.

Shaun,
See if your 3max at work can look into Integritywares subd to nurbs tool.. I've been interested in how this tool works.

Looks interesting. Is there a link to a demo somewhere?

Thanks. I'll need permission from our IT dept to install it so I don't know if I can try it soon. But I'll try to find an excuse to demo it on the next project.