I trimmed a surface , created with ZSurf, then formed a solid with it. but when I try to boolean merge, runs into problems, I guess the problem is to many control points.

Is there anything I can do to reduce the number of control points?

Hi Steve - you can use the ShrinkTrimmedSrf command to remove excess control points from the outside area of an underlying surface that has been trimmed:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#shrinktrimmedsrf

But there isn't any easy method for reducing control points from interior areas of a surface, I think that there are some options for controlling the density of the generated surface when you construct it from ZSurf though.

- Michael

Hi Michael

I've tried ShrinkTrimmedSrf and it does not seem to have any effect, should I see all the points from the trimmed off sections go?

I'll keep playing :)

Cheers, Steve

It wont follow the trimmed edges. It will remove the points, up to a bounding box of the shape...

Hi Steve,

> I've tried ShrinkTrimmedSrf and it does not seem to
> have any effect, should I see all the points from the
> trimmed off sections go?

Points that are totally to the exterior of the outermost trimming boundary will go away, stuff like this - with this trimmed surface here, you can see the "underlying surface" is larger than the current active area of the surface:



If you have a situation like that you can run ShrinkTrimmedSrf on it which discard areas of the surface that are larger than the bounding box around the outermost trimming boundary, giving this result:




An underlying NURBS surface is always made up of a rectangular grid of points though, so it's not possible to discard just some control points from the middle of the surface, so it won't shrink away stuff from interior holes and it won't have any effect if you have an outermost trim boundary that touches the edges of the underlying surface already.

- Michael

Thanks Michael

Not sure what was going on, last night, when I tried to Merge the eagle with a solid, it would recreate part of the surfaces that had been trimmed off. So I thought it had something to do with all those control points left over after the trim.

This morning I started from scratch , created a new surface in ZSurf, imported to MoI, trimmed it , made it solid, merged with another solid... all worked with out a hitch :)
I was done in 5mins :)

I can't bee 100% sure I followed the same steps has last night. but was pretty close... :) let's just flag this issue has "user error" :)

Hi Steve, if some of the shaded display is kind of leaking out past the trimming boundaries that usually means the trimming boundary is badly formed somehow, like it's got some kind of self-intersecting loop-de-loop in it or something else like that which is making for an inconsistent definition of what's inside versus what's outside the loop.

- Michael

I'm sure your right Michael.

Today I've made to models, both worked first time. no problems at all :)

Cheers, Steve