Hi guys, I'm quite new to Moi, just firs week learning. Faced a problem - can't make solid from jointed surface
Found some posts about naked ages, defined them but what to do next? how to fix my model? trying to figure out but useless, scaled, redraw blah blah blah :( but same result
Hope somebody can show me the right pipeline :)

Hi Pirandos,

You're starting out with a fairly difficult goal and there are more problems with the current model than just naked edges: little curve fragments, control point structure on tail surfaces that collapse down to a point rather than being a nice grid, a duplicate surface near the cockpit, and the center parting line isn't planar.

If I wanted to learn how to do this I'd go through the tutorials linked here:

http://www.k4icy.com/tutorials.html

And here's a tutorial specific to airplanes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD1OmZ-llZk

Overall I would try to make surfaces as large as possible and try to get them solid as soon as possible rather than hoping to stitch together a bunch of small surfaces at the very end. Solid operations like booleans are much nicer to deal with.

- Peer

By the way, there are more naked edges than shown in your screenshot:



I highlighted all the naked edges with Browser > Types > Edges > Naked.

- Peer

Hi Pirandos, there is a little bit too wide of a gap in some places like here:





- Michael

Hi Pirandos, the attached version here is a solid now. I needed to rebuild some surfaces to get them a little closer together to be able to join them.

Like Peer mentions above it can be better to have larger surfaces instead of a lot of smaller pieces. This is a pretty difficult type of model in general though.

- Michael

Dear Peer, thanks for the reply and tutorial links, btw the airplane tutorial was the place where I learned about moi3d in general :)
About fragmented curves - I can not figure out why they appears, I draw normal curves but somehow after some manipulations they starting to break in to the segments

Dear Michael, big thanks for the reply and solid model
I did small surfaces just to follow reference model ribs and planes than i used network to form each panel, thats why it looks like it looks
but still can not understand why there are gaps between planes if I use the same curves to form neighbour panels?

Hi Pirandos,

re:
> but still can not understand why there are gaps between planes if I use the same curves
> to form neighbour panels?

Probably there are some spots where the curve endpoints are not exactly touching each other.

Do you have a version saved off with the curves in it? If you could post that I might be able to answer this better.

- Michael

I was trying yo make at least central section solid but it also has very small naked edge which i can not even find by "N" key shortcut

Hi Pirandos, you can have a better chance to see something very tiny like that if you switch the 3D view projection from perspective to parallel. That's under Options > View > "3D view projection" = Parallel. In a perspective view it can be difficult to see a tiny piece like that when you approach it because the near clipping plane will tend to cut it out.

The easiest way to get rid of that one is to delete the front face, then select the whole object and run Construct > Planar to make a new plane end cap.

There are a couple of small edge pieces at the bottom of the front face, it would probably be good to get rid of those. You can do that by running the Merge command ( https://moi3d.com/4.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#merge ) after deleting the front face and before running Construct > Planar.

- Michael

Big thanks for the reply, Michael.
Am I right hat curve and edge is different and not equal? I mean if I built network plane based on 4 curves, than I can select occasionally plane edge and built another plane based on edge and it can make a hole between 2 planes? sorry for such a dummy explanation :)

Hi Pirandos,

re:
> Am I right hat curve and edge is different and not equal?

This is particularly the case if the curves do not meet up at the endpoints exactly.

Here's an example - Network can still generate a surface if the curve ends are not exactly matched up but the surface result will be kind of an average between them:







- Michael

Hi Pirandos,

Here's a plugin to help finding tiny curves and edges. It's called findShortest and is attached.

If you run findShortest on Pits_central-strange_.3dm and then zoom out this is what you'll see:



The shortest edge happens to be the naked edge that you're looking for, but there are also other tiny edges that aren't naked. Often really short edges or curves are a sign of a problem that will mess up booleans even if the tiny edge isn't naked.

This plugin will ignore locked or hidden edges, so if you run it and decide that what it found isn't what you are looking for, lock or hide the edge / curve that it is selected and run the plugin again. That will find the next shortest edge / curve.

That way you can work your way through a model with multiple problems by basically marking stuff as complete as you go by hiding or locking it. Of course, it would probably be better to actually fix the stuff that it finds.

If you want to focus only on naked edges, then instead of selecting the entire airplane at the start, select only naked edges using Browser > Types > Edges > Naked and then run findShortest.

This plugin sets the 3D view to "Parallel" rather than perspective. When you're done finding short edges you can change that back to "Perspective" under Options:



Install by going to MoI's appdata folder.

On Windows you can find the Moi appdata folder by typing Win+R to bring up the Windows "Run" dialog and then type in:
%AppData%\Moi\

On Mac from a Finder window, go to the menu and pick Go > "Go to folder" and type in:
~/Library/Application Support/Moi/

You should see the folders “commands” and "startup". Put findShortest.js in commands.

To set up a shortcut key go to Options > Shortcut Keys and type in findShortest as the command name.

- Peer

Peer, thanks for the reply and plugin, I was tryin to find something like this!
But how come that short curve segment appears??? I draw normal curves but after some manipulations it brakes in to segments

Hi Pirandos,

re:
> But how come that short curve segment appears??? I draw normal curves but after some
> manipulations it brakes in to segments

It's hard to say without being able to reproduce it but it's probably from the same issue that is ending up with some small gaps between surfaces.

If I had the curves available to examine, I would look for places where their endpoints are not all exactly lined up with each other.

- Michael