Rich_Art,

The two problems I'm seeing is that, not only are some of the areas you want to fillet too small for the sized fillet you desire, but I think the fillet tool is having a hard time 'seeing' around that seam below the pointer notch on top, above the button's top surface.

First, I would try filleting both the pointer and button body objects separately, then union-ing them.

Second, you might want to attempt a manual fillet procedure: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4607.5

Using your edge curves to act as paths for swept circles, which are used to difference an offset of material away so that you can re-build with blend surfaces.

But try to fillet the main objects separately to bring the complexity down.

Rich_Art,

Here, check this out: http://k4icy.50webs.com/tutorials/knob_x1.3dm




I cleaned up each of the main objects: (knob body and pointer shape), then I was able to separately Fillet their edges and the Unioned each together.

A note: you had a few surface edge curves that were split on the same surface. Though, this state may have not had any affect on your fillet issue, it doesn't hurt to enter the 'Merge' command to put them together. You can use the 'Merge' command even when everything is selected - it will find the objects needing to be merged.

But yes, it must have been that seam line under the pointer.


Also, I know that you wanted the corner where the pointer and the knob meets to be filleted. You may need to use a manual method there if a regular fillet doesn't work.

Thanks Mike...

LoL. I just added a bevel before adding the little top part. At that moment I thought it was better to first join the little upper part with the rest of the knob and then the bevel.
In your example I see you just bevel first and then joining the little part on the knob....

Anyway, thanks for your time and I'll remake the knob with your workflow.....

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

Hi Rich_Art, one thing that makes this more difficult for filleting is having the front piece here fragmented into 2 different surfaces with this edge separating them:



It would be better in that situation to have just one big front face there instead of it fragmented into 2 front pieces like that.

Then the other thing that could cause you some fillet difficulty here is that you have only a very small amount of space for a fillet to actually fit over here:



Filleting will get confused if you try to ask for a fillet that would entirely eat away that little tiny edge on the back there, so that's going to limit your fillet to quite a small value.

- Michael

Hi Rich_Art, here I've attached a 3DM file with those front faces combined to just a single surface, it should probably fillet more easily now.

I combined those faces by first deleting them:



Then I extruded the bottom circle upwards far enough to encompass where both those faces were previously:



Then used Edit > Trim to cut the bigger surface with the other piece above and removed this area:



Then Edit > Join can be used to glue the pieces together into a tuned-up solid and just that little bit of cleaner topology will be more friendly for filleting, especially since the 2 previous pieces were not quite 100% identical surfaces, it looked like the bottom piece was an extrusion but the top one was maybe a sweep or came from a slightly different generator curve or something like that.

- Michael

Hi Rich_Art, so that knob2.3dm that I posted above with the slightly cleaned up topology for the front will now fillet those faces that you were originally asking about better. But you can see here that there's only room for a fillet radius of 0.06 units or so before the fillets would start to collide into each other in that small area:







If you wanted to do bigger than 0.06 then you'd need to do something else other than filleting all those edges at the same time - if you left some of them sharp and only filleted some selective ones that would let you get a bigger fillet on some of them.

- Michael

That looks cool Michael... I'll check our solution asap..

Thanks for the help (again)

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)