new Moi user: have an object with network made from 4 horizontal curves , one ellipse on top and one ellipse on bottom (see pic1).

pick bottom and make planar. Boolean union network and planar bottom to make one object.

the problem I am having is filleting the bottom. what is best way to pick and use this.

fillet says you can pick the bottom face to fillet. tried that and it does not work.

pick the bottom ellipse and that does not work.

hide the bottom ellipse and pick the bottom edge. the pick picks only a segment of the bottom (there are many segment all around). do not understand that (see pic2) ?

pick the whole object to fillet the bottom that does not work?

I one time did make fillet work , but can not repeat the procedure, forgot how I made it work.

I have used geomagic (alibre) , using moi is new to me and do not understand how fillet work in this semi-complex shape.
I can repeatedly make a circle , extrude , and planar on bottom , union , and fillet , but can not do it using the semi-complex network and planar.
I tried doing a complex bottle tutorial before this and was having problem there with fillet.

attached : pic1 pic2 and model file

Hi Robert. The problem is in your workflow.

"Boolean" should be reserved for "closed objects", whether they are 2d or 3d. "Join" should be used when needing to join open things, like surfaces.

Here is a video where I zoom in on some fragmented surface pieces that are making your fillets fail. I then rebuild the network with your curves and show you that the "planar" command, will work on any planar openings of an object. You can still select that bottom edge and run planar to create the surface, but then you would use "join", to connect it to the other pieces. Not Boolean.

Also, remember to hide the construction curves from your model. Selecting those, instead of the surface edges, would have the fillet fail also...

Hi Robert, it looks like the problem is that not all the edges on the bottom are actually glued together, there are various "naked edges" down there, a naked edge is one that only belongs to one surface rather than being joined between 2 surfaces.

That's also why your bottom edge is fragmented into some different segments, my guess is that the network surface undulates slightly and kind of dips up here and there from the bottom planar surface.

You can see naked edges by setting up a shortcut key with a script on it as described here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6051.2

I'll take a closer look at your model to see why that has happened, but my guess is that some of the curves you are using to network with don't quite have their endpoints exactly on the bottom plane.

- Michael

Snatched the peanuts from his hand!

Hi Robert, so your network curve structure seems to be fine... I'm not sure exactly how you got the bottom sliced up into some little pieces but like burr mentions it's not just naked edges there are some little teeny tiny slivery surfaces in those segmented areas as well.

Check out Burr's video - the main way you would want to construct this is to select your curves, run Network, then hide or delete the curves to get them out of the way (they can interfere with edge selection later on). Then select the surface that you just created and run Construct > Planar on that, that will seal off the top and bottom planar openings and you'll have a solid, which should then be well behaved for filleting, I've attached the result here.

I guess at some point you did an operation like boolean or trim on that bottom zone which tries to intersect things and cut away material, that must have ended up slicing off some kind of degenerate slivery pieces that then got in the way after that...

- Michael

You win this time Burr, with a video no less! :)

- Michael

Hi Robert, also it seems that you're using version 2 - you should probably use the current v3 beta instead which you can get from here: http://moi3d.com/beta.htm

If you would have done the same steps including boolean union in v3 it actually works ok - there's been a bug fixed in v3 that deals with combining overlapping closed edge curves, and a whole lot of other fixes and improvements too so it's just generally better to use v3 instead of v2.

Usually though it does tend to be better to use Edit > Join to glue together 2 surfaces at common edges that already meet up, because Join _only_ glues together edges and does not try to slice up objects with one another. Boolean union can work for this too, but really the booleans are overall more focused on intersecting objects with one another and removing some chunks. If you know that there is not any cutting involved using Join can just be more reliable since it's more targeted in only doing that particular job.

And if your object has planar openings, you can just select the whole object as the input into Construct > Planar and it will look for edges that form a closed planar opening and automatically create the planar cap and join it into place all for you, so that's a shortcut for this kind of thing too.


Anyway in this particular case you were running into a bug that's been fixed a ways back in v3, the bug made your bottom edge fragmented into pieces.


- Michael

OK. got it done. did locate the loose fragments and deleted. I had tried join but failed , guess due to fragments.

http://www.k4icy.com/tutorials.html is the link where I was trying the complex detergent bottles but failed in filleting the bottom.

now with this info will go at it again.

I got my Moi a few days ago through Geomagic ( alibre , have the expert version ). do not know why they did not offer the beta 3.
their licensing are pretty strict. wonder what would happen if I upgrade to beta 3 myself. do not know if they will offer version 3 upgrade for free when it out.
Does Moi check where you purchased their software from?
Will there be a price for their final version 3?

Thanks everyone for you help.

Hi Robert,

> Does Moi check where you purchased their software from?

No, there aren't any restrictions based on where you purchased, you can use your current v2 license key you got from Alibre to download the current v3 beta, it's free until the final release is out. Just put in your v2 license key here to get it: http://moi3d.com/beta.htm .


> do not know if they will offer version 3 upgrade for free when it out.

I don't know either, there hasn't been any planning yet for what will happen to the Alibre bundle when MoI v3 comes out. Maybe we will put together a special package for that, but I'm not sure about that.


> Will there be a price for their final version 3?

Yeah but you'll be able to purchase a reduced price upgrade version rather than the full version.


In the meantime, I really do recommend using the v3 beta version, in your particular case here you would actually not have run into this problem if you did the same steps on v3 instead of v2.

V3 is getting pretty close to being released, I'm just trying to cram in some of the last features for it.

- Michael

OK Michael will try the beta tomorrow . late already. thanks for the info.

Hi Robert,

Here are one or two pointers:

Make sure that all of the vertical curves touch the bottom ellipse exactly. Use your snaps.
Also, make sure that the bottom ellipse, ring shape, or whatever is precisely planar itself.
If none of those two requirements are met then the Network command may produce a surface with a non-planar bottom edge that may be just out of tolerance for a Join to the planar bottom surface.

Also, make sure, if you have made the bottom ring profile out of multiple curves, as I had done in the tutorial, that the ends of each touching curve are exactly tangent with each other.

However, if you are still unable to get the two surfaces to perfectly Join, consider doing the following:

Make a planar surface larger than the opening, and then move it up into the network surface with just a bit of the network passing completely through the plane.
Then select the bottom plane and the network surface and do a Boolean Merge. You should have four surfaces. Delete the excess and you should be able to join the newly trimmed plane and network surface together.

If for some reason, the edge curves are segmented, you should always first try to run the "Merge" text command, which is not the same as Boolean 'Merge'. The text command 'Merge' will often join the broken edge segments into one.

---------------------------
....funny, I deleted your surfaces and re-made the network and planar again using your curves and everything worked. [???]
Must be a v2 vs v3 thing.
But still, take my above wisdom for what it is. :-)