I've been trying to see a way to do this. It just seemed like it should. Here I used a revolve tent object, then placed 4 at different pole angles, and booleaned to a larger curved surface. Then I could fillet between them to finish the "cloth". If it is close at all, we can look at best practices. If not, just another failed attempt.. :o

Hi Burr, that is a good way to do it.

The potential difficulty might be in getting a nice blend shape between them, a fillet with a circular cross-section may give a kind of "machined" look to the blended area. Using a G2 blend shape instead of circular shape could help with that. It may have some difficulty getting a nice shape in the shared corner region between 3 of the shapes where the blends come together.

Then if you want to produce a kind of pointy outline around the outer edge of the shape you could do that by trimming away some of the outside area by a profile curve from the top rather than trying to incorporate an outline like this directly into the surface construction:




It tends to be difficult to surface something with such irregularity or localized small tight bends in it directly, instead building a more simple smooth larger surface like you are showing and then trimming it is usually better.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
Yes I noticed this. The circular fillet didnt seem like a "perfect finish". The G2 looked better, but produced some folds at intersection areas. Too much adjusting to try and get perfect!!!

I was wondering if the "multi edge Blend" may work here when we get that tool. I had started with a blend idea but had to abandon it. The ability to blend between "3 or 4 cones" would probably do this easy...

Thanks for looking.

Hi Burr,

> I was wondering if the "multi edge Blend" may work
> here when we get that tool.

Yeah often that is called an "N-sided patch" that fits a surface through some potentially irregular boundary edges while maintaining tangency to existing surfaces there. That kind of tool would help to fill in the areas where several blends are coming together.


You would still use the regular Blend command to build most of the connections, but the N-sided patch where the various blends collide with one another.


The Blend command handling multiple edges is slightly different - it's still a 2-sided thing but it means making it possible to have a chain of various different edges for each side of the blend rather than just 1 single edge on each side.

- Michael

SO here is a blend attempt.Between each revolve is a blend that works well, but your left with that middle hole. Is this a part we cant do without "N-Patch" or is there a way to fill this. I was thinking even of putting in a tiny little surface in the top center and using blend on the four edges again, then just having the little tiny thing at top be a bit rough (Or even fill it with a new revolve tent, like a vent top).

Anyway, seemd close except for this last part which it seems like you were talking about already.

Hi Burr, yeah it is that center part that is the problem. Just a regular Blend is not quite good enough for that area, because Blend makes a smooth connection between 2 different sides, but in that area you want a smooth connection between 4 sides, not just 2.

You can fill the hole with something like Network or Sweep, but it will have a crease there instead of it being a smooth fill.

If you can make the hole to be a pretty small size then the crease may become difficult to see though.

But yes, filling in holes like that with a smooth surface is what an N-Sided patch tool would be used for, there is not really another tool that does the exact same job.

- Michael

Got it! Thanks.