Please see attached file. I'm trying to create some kind of tunnel with an opening by sweeping those two profiles along the rail.



To do that, first I select the profiles and union them because currently each consists of two separate pieces. I get this:



Then I select the profiles, click sweep, click the rail, confirm and then I get "Calculation failed".

Hi,

I don't understand where is your problem, but could avoid this problem.

You could extrude your profiles to have a straight version then you flow it to do what you want using your rail as flow curve.

First you do your union to have profiles
Extrude it (exemple 10mm)
do a line perpendicular 10mm.
Flow (with stretch) your 2 solids (the extrude solids) with the 10mm line as first curve and your curve (ex-rail) as second line.

You want this ?

That workaround kind of works, but it gets pretty distorted at the top.

By the way, I believe the reason why the sweep fails is that MoI interprets the two profiles as the start and end profile and auto-places the (incompatible) profiles on the rail. That's of course not what I want here, but instead I'd like MoI to interpret the two curves as one profile and generate two solids, keeping their respective distance from the rail. Not sure if that is possible though.

> You want this?

That looks somewhat like what I want, but the tops of the objects should be perpendicular to the rail.

<Perpendicular to the rail

Seems they are ?

On the Top If you want something different of that you must just modify the targets of the rails!

Hi Andre,

re:
> but instead I'd like MoI to interpret the two curves as one profile and generate two solids, keeping
> their respective distance from the rail. Not sure if that is possible though.

Sorry no currently that's not possible to do in one single run of the Sweep command. The sweep command is expecting multiple profile curves to be at different stations along the path curve, so that the profile can morph between those curves as it travels along the rail. It isn't set up to have multiple profile curves all at the same position on the rail.

Doing a boolean union on the curves before the sweep will have no effect since they do not intersect each other.

In the future I'd like to make some way to set this up how you were expecting, maybe by grouping.

- Michael

STEP 1 Extrude


STEP 2 Draw a line


STEP 3 Flow with your rail (don't miss the stretch option)



Is this what you want ?

Next delete the 2 solids done with extrude...

I think it's OK for your case because it's equivalent for an "only one profile sweep".
Not very orthodox, but the job is done.

In this case I solved it by temporarily connecting the two shapes:



And then cutting the connection after sweeping:



Incidentally this is similar to how it's gonna be printed, the 3D printer dislikes loose parts just as much as MoI does. :)

Hi Andre, was the problem that sweep "auto place" mode was being triggered when you didn't want it?

If so then another way to fix it would be to use Construct > Offset on your rail to make one that touches the profile to be swept like this:



In the future I want to add in some kind of control for sweep so you can tell it to do "auto place" or not explicitly, the current way it tries to detect it can have it turned on when it is not wanted like in your case here.

- Michael