Hello,

how can I create a smooth join between the 3 elements without creating intermediate edges?

Hi Simba, it can sometimes be better to make 3 arms connect to a central hub and then use filleting to smooth out their junctures, to do it that way you would draw 3 straight arms coming out from a central piece initially, see the sunburst video for a general example of how to do that:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/tutorials.htm


In your case here if you made the pieces meet up better than they do now you could try using Construct > Nsided to fill in the empty area. But there are various things you need to clean up, you would probably need to make the arms match up better in height with each other when they come together, currently one is fairly taller than the others, making it hard to construct a matching piece:



Also the edges do not meet up very well in spots like these:





That large of a gap between edges will prevent NSided from being able to form a closed boundary on those edges.

It can be easier to do forms that involve lots of smooth branching in a sub-d polygon modeler rather than in MoI.

- Michael

And the side edges don't seem to all be flat, I've tried to move them to all to the same level and they don't match up because at least one has some kind of rotation to it rather than being all on one plane...

That kind of misalignment where things meet up will make for a lot more difficulty trying to connect them up.

- Michael

Hi simba, I've attached the result of one covering method here.

First I had to rotate your objects so that their edges ended all one the same flat plane.

Then I deleted the end caps and used Edit > Trim with the "Add trim points" option on each edge to split it into 3 pieces.


Then in each corner area I used Construct > Blend between 2 neighboring edges to build these pieces:



Then the remaining opening was filled in with Construct > NSided:




The result of that construction is in the attached 3DM file.

- Michael

Hello,

You could also construct the leading edges first using sweep and do a N-Sided patch command for the center. This would minimize bunching in the corners.

Hello,

I tried the suggested approach but when I apply the NSided patch, the calculation fails always (check attached file).

Maybe I apply NSided the wrong way?

Hi simba, I see that there are a lot of curve objects in your file with the curves sitting right on top of edges - that can be problematic because for N-sided to work you need to select edges, not just curves. So try hiding or deleting those curves first and that may help.

Also another thing that can cause n-sided to fail is if the edges do not touch each other at endpoints, like if there is too much of a gap between them. It looks like you have this problem in some areas of your model, like for example here there seems to be a gap of around 0.03 units in size, that's too large and it makes NSided not recognize the chain of edges as a closed loop:





- Michael

Interesting discussion. Nsided is a tool I hadn't used before.

I am running into these tiny little gaps all the time, I haven't figured out why.

Hi simba, usually it means some of the initial construction curves were not quite meeting end-to-end.

One thing to watch when you're initially drawing things is that you're getting the "end" snap points on things, not just any other snap point like "perp" that happen to be nearby the end points.

- Michael