What is the best way to turn a surface in to a solid? I made a surface of a component of a plastic houseware and I need to increase the wall thickness to 1.5 mm. In general I am having problems with complex surfaces. I have tried the same in other CAD software with no luck so far. Am I doing something wrong?

Hi rarmada, you generally would use the Construct > Offset > Shell command to thicken a surface into a solid.

But that will only basically work when the surface you are thickening is one completely smooth piece. When you try to thicken something that has sharp corners and little side pieces hanging off it's a much, much more complex problem.

Check out here for a recent discussion with some links to previous discussions on this topic:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5633.3

Something like what you have there has a lot of things that make it complicated to thicken - pieces that are close to being smooth to one another but actually at a shallow angle - long thin pokey parts, .... I'm not sure that there would be much chance of automatically thickening something of this level of complexity. You may need to work on it on a more manual level, that would be by breaking it apart into individual surfaces and then using the Offset command to generate offsets, and then work on trimming or doing some additional modeling to build up connecting parts between the offsets.

- Michael

I think it is the way that the surface was made.

The blue surface is your original and the green one is the offset of 1.5mm. Since you had mentioned thickening failed in a few packages already I went with offset to try to avoid a failure. Sure enough, the model ends up with open faces. I am not sure what your modeling process was but there is something about how the surfaces were trimmed during your process. This might be able to be solved by untrimming it but I will yield to any number of the more expert surface people on the blog.

I did try a few things such as seperating the surfaces and then trying to use the edges for closing off the surfaces but got strange results. Someone might know what is going on by looking at the control cage.