And just one more comment on Rebuild - one of the other uses of Rebuild is to simplify a curve's control point structure. That's why the default tolerance is 0.01 units, because a tighter tolerance also needs more control points.

But 0.01 units deviation will be too large if you want to build joinable surfaces using the original the the rebuilt one for surfaces that meet up.

Things need to be no more than 0.005 units apart to be joinable.

So you'd need to use a rebuild with something more like a 0.001 tolerance for this case, or really it's probably better to discard the original curve and only use the rebuilt one for all the next surface construction so all the surfaces come from the same curves.

- Michael

Or it may be possible for you to avoid doing a separate rebuild at all - if you have a curve made up of multiple segments that are tangent to each other, Network will actually automatically rebuild that for you with a tight joinable tolerance already.

- Michael

And for the join thing, what you don't want is to have something like this selected when you do a Join:



Join only tries to join 2 curves together at any one common point, while these areas have 3 curves with a common point:



It's kind of random what you will get, it can easily be something like this:



- Michael

Excellent - this will move me forward for sure. Thanks very much.

Thanks - I did not know that network rebuilds. Really great info.

Practicing basics from the manual and came across this sweep command which kind of reminds me a little of what the kid in the video posted earlier in this thread did - although his looked like it has isocurves - which I still haven't figured out are for . . .lol. Anyway, someone like Barry or Jopo could probably do a heck of a neck transition with the sweep command - I still need more practice - but it's really cool. The 2nd picture is after trimming with a line . . . still practicing jopo and Barry's latest methods but need more practice.

Need help with putting a .125 fillet on the front and back edge of this model. So far it fails when the edges are selected when using the fillet command.

Thanks for help and suggestions. Thanks.

Hi Neil, so the first thing is it looks like you've got some curve objects right in the same spots as the edges. You'll need to hide or delete those so they won't get in the way of selecting edges.

Take a look at the object type indicator after you've made your selection:


If that says "Curve" or "Curves" then that means you have curve objects selected and not edges of the solid, that will say "Edges" if you've got edges selected.

Then there will be other challenges to filleting this as well like the pointy area and several edges are not smooth to each other, spots like here are about 1 to 3 degrees off from being smooth which will often make it difficult to fillet:



But the first step will be to make sure you're getting the selection right.

- Michael

Hi Michael, thank you very much for the help - not sure what you mean by, "smooth to eachother" - do you mean that the shape should have been filleted before sculpting the arm and belly contours?

Thanks to Michael's help was able to fillet this up to .25 on the top and .2 on the back - which is better than hoped - was going for .125 but .25 is even better.

Hi Neil, I mean the ending directions aren't actually tangent there. Just like this example isn't smooth here:



In this example here it's much more obvious that there is a sharp corner. In your cases it's not so obvious because it's only like 3 degrees off from being smooth. That doesn't sound like much but for filleting it can be bad to have shallow corners like that. The reason why is that different fillet pieces will only naturally match each other at smooth spots. At spots that aren't smooth they have to be extended and intersected or have a corner patch made for them. But when it's a shallow angle it tends to make situations like the corner junctures being really small slivery bits which don't behave so well.

Sounds like it isn't a big problem for your case here but the upshot is that it's good for filleting to make your original curve pieces fully tangent to each other in spots like that and not just pretty close to being tangent.

- Michael

Thanks for explaining. Will work on that.

Would it be possible, or useful, to have a script which would examine the end tangents of end connected curves, and report if the tangents were equal or not?
...Filtering tangents which are greater, or lesser, than a tolerance...?

- Brian

Hi Brian, yes that would definitely be useful and I do expect to have something for that built in at some point here when I can figure out a good place to put it.

- Michael

Here are a few renderings of the model - really like how the contours turned out.

Looking good Neil!

- Michael

Yes it's really good !

Here is a heel, neck transition - it is nice and smooth on the left side - so I mirrored that side - but the right side has a seam - how to fix this?

Thanks, N

Hi Neil, it helps a lot if you can post the 3DM model file with the geometry in it instead of only a screenshot.

That allows for a lot more detailed analysis of what's going on.

- Michael

Lol - sorry Michael - the file is attached now.