Hi,

I have a number of questions now starting with shelling.

Shelling seems to fail very easily...see attached image the two models top & bottom where
shelled in another application when im sure it should be possible in MoI ?

Rhino does not have shelling (yet...V5) so it would be a marvelous advantage to have it
working better ?

Any plans Michael

Hi Paul, well it's not really totally up to me - I get the shelling function from the geometry library that I license.

I have noticed that there are some particular bugs involving offsets of surfaces that have a "pole" point in them (where one surface edge is collapsed down to a single point) - that's the part that is going wrong in this case. So far most of the basic shelling problems I have seen seem to involve that particular bug. Hopefully if I can fix that one bug it should tune up basic shelling to work quite a bit better.

If you have shapes without those kinds of poles in them, you'll probably see basic shelling work pretty well.

I doubt that it will ever really get to the same level of sophistication as stuff like Pro/E or SolidWorks, but I'll probably be able to get basic stuff like your example here working better.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the reply.

Even just creating a rectangular extrusion with a 5mm radius on the corners, then trying to shell 6/7mm fails when
most other systems manage that ?

I for one would be very grateful for any improvements you can make.

TIA

Hi Paul - that new one you mention involves surfaces being totally consumed during the offset. That tends to be a pretty complex area, I would not consider any kind of self-intersection or surface consuming type scenarios to fit in the "simple shell" category, sorry.... I don't have a whole lot of optimism that such things will happen anytime soon.

If you need more robust shelling with stuff like consumed surfaces / interfering offsets, stuff like that, it is not likely that MoI is going to do those jobs for you. You'll need to use something Pro/E, SolidWorks, etc... for that kind of stuff. That's not going to change anytime soon.

But I do think that it will be possible to get non-interfering and non-consuming situations to work better though.

- Michael

Cheers Michael,

I didnt mean it was simple for this to get done or calculate.....it's just our other modeler goes a lot lot further than this.

>>But I do think that it will be possible to get non-interfering and non-consuming situations to work better though.

Well, that would be great if you can tune it up some more - thanks!!

Would you happen to know what Cad product deals with shelling Surfs/Solids the best ?

Hi Paul,

> Would you happen to know what Cad product deals
> with shelling Surfs/Solids the best ?

I don't really know for sure, but my guess would be either Pro/E or SolidWorks.

- Michael

That's right Michael, I think any modeling package that uses the parasolid kernel is strong in this area, If you do a lot of shelling that's fine, if not, there is always a workaround in MoI to get the same result.

~Danny~

Thanks Michael / DannyT - Some of our mould cavities and quite complex and shelling can be a big problem sometimes....and
would be almost impossible to workaround in MoI (at the moment at might add)

I will do more investigation...in the meantime im going to buy MoI now :-)

Cheers,