I was doing a trim project and ended up with multiple non solids (the pillars). I was wondering ifthere was an easy way to create solids out of them without doing them one at a time.

I dont want to boolean the whole thing so I keep seperate objects.

I was thinking of seperating the large solid, then duplicating it's surface to use as a boolean diff with the pillars.

Would this be an appropriate solution?

Also, here is a 3dm file. After I do a copy and paste to bring the objects into a new doc, the display goes haywire. Is there a setting thats causing this or????

Thanks,
Burr

Hi Burr, it looks like the Construct / Planar tool should do the job for you in this case.

It does a couple of different things - it can turn a planar curve into a trimmed plane object, but another thing is it can seal any planar openings on an open object.

In your case each of those little posts has a planar opening at the top and bottom, so you can select all of them (just one strategic window from the front view can grab them all, do the window selection starting from the left and moving towards the right to do the "only capture inside" type window), then run Construct/Planar and all those posts should get solidified into little box solids.


If you wanted to sort of do a boolean but keep things as separate pieces, you might want to be using the Boolean "Merge" option for that, rather than Edit/Trim - Merge will slice everything with each other but then keeps all the pieces and will try to form solids out of the result.

Trim works only on the "skin" of an object and does not try to preserve volumes like the booleans do.

- Michael

I see. I was trying to select the "edges" then run the planar with no luck. Amateur once again!


BTW: The crazy screen thing happens when I launch with file click. If I launch MoI then select the file, all is well.(I've registered MoI to open 3dm files).

Thanks,
Burr

Hi Burr, doing it by selecting edges would have worked eventually, but yeah it would take a lot more steps.

re: display thing - sorry I missed that part... I gave it a quick try over here and I didn't seem to run into any problems.

Crazy stuff on the screen is usually an indication that there is a bug in your video driver.

Probably your best bet for that would be to update to the latest driver version that is available. Normally the best way to do that is to go to the web site of your video card's manufacturer and they will have a "Drivers" page there that has the latest on it.

- Michael

Michael,
I tried the Merge option with that type and found the pillars to leave seperate sqaures and surfaces also.

Would I need to worry about these aor would they just appear as part of the same solid. If I wanted one solid for the piece the pillars were sitting on, is there an easy way to weld or union all that?

Also, When making "Many small pieces of the same thing, it can generate a load on the app and computer. I've seen in other apps where they use some kind of "Instancing" or "cloning" for this (Basically one object for the computer, "referenced 675 times". Is this something MoI could generate at some point?

Thanks again for your time,
Burr

Hi Burr, I do want to have a kind of "instance" type mechanism at some point in the future. It will probably be a little while before I can get to that though, it is a fairly involved thing to add.

re: pieces and solids - I'm afraid I'm not quite 100% certain what it is that you're trying to do here.

I got the file you posted previously where you wanted to solidify those open posts, but it sounds like you are also working on something slightly different than that?

Do you have an example of the file in a state before you started doing boolean merge or trimming to it? If you could post that instead of the one that was already trimmed, it would probably help me understand what you want to do.

If you don't want to cut up the base "shelves" kind of part and you have some long pillars that you want to be sliced up, for that you would not want to do merge, but instead pick all the pillars and then do boolean difference and use the shelf as the cutting object. That will cut up the pillars how you want I think. It will also remove the shelf but to solve that problem before you do the boolean select just the shelf and do a Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard, then do Ctrl+V after the boolean is complete to paste the shelf back in again.


I think that may be what you want to get? Oops - I see now where I got confused and put you on the wrong track with merge, I thought you wanted the shelf part cut as well (which is what merge would be for) because I thought it was cut up in your previous example but I see now that what I thought were holes were just the top parts of the posts showing through.

- Michael

{
If you don't want to cut up the base "shelves" kind of part and you have some long pillars that you want to be sliced up, for that you would not want to do merge, but instead pick all the pillars and then do boolean difference and use the shelf as the cutting object.
}

Thats the answer with the copy and paste part.

I dont have somthing specific to give you, It's just exercising MoI to figure it out. It's just a box with shelving and an array of the pillars through it to acheive the chopped up pillars and the best practices for MoI.

Thanks for the help, I've grown a bit!

Child of MoI,
Burr