Hello everyone,

I have attached a file of a surface I created. I need to add thickness to it i.e. give it a volume. Thickness must be 2mm in the direction of the arrow. I tried doing this using offset-->shell but that didn't work. Not sure if that's the correct way to do it so I'm open to suggestions. Also if someone could explain why it didn't work that would be a great help as I don't see any errors in the file.

TIA.

Hi Sebastian, the most problematic areas of the file are some 3 sided surfaces in these areas which have a tightly bent rolled-over shape along one side:







Those aren't going to offset, the offset surface will go crazy trying to track a 2mm distance along surface normals that are changing very rapidly in such a small area.

MoI's shell function is pretty basic, it can usually thicken a surface if it's all smooth. if there are sharp corners it will generally not be able to handle that. That's because the offsets of surfaces that are not tangent where they touch will not naturally touch each other. They would need to be extended and intersected with each other and the geometry library that MoI currently uses for this is not good at handling that type of situation.

There are some other areas that are not smooth here:






So what you can do to get some pieces built is to use Edit > Separate on it to break it into individual surfaces, and then use Construct > Offset > Offset to build offset surfaces of all the surfaces. That should give you a lot of good pieces to use, then you'll need to construct some new surfaces to fill in areas as needed.

- Michael

Thanks Michael.