Hi Michael, Thanks for your time!

So the metallic lighting option would help best for surface inspection?

"It will be particularly difficult to shell or offset surfaces that have tightly bent areas in them where you try to use a thickness that is greater than the radius of curvature in those areas."

This explains a lot! Are there any software capable of measuring minimum curvature in lofts or splines? I know where this occurs in the lofted part and I might be able to get rid of this problem by moving the control points in the 3d splines. Might speed up the process if I could quickly obtain minimum curvature. If only it were possible to keep the curvature in a spline larger than the required shell this problem might be dodged then?

I have to say that MoI have a higher success rate in shelling than GMD! But GMD have an alternative way to shell. The one in MoI are similar to the "Thicken" command in GMD's surfacing tab. Offsetting the surface perpendicular to the selected one (which I like to think of as the organic way), and then the "shell" command where you select faces of a solid and the shell is, what I like to think as, done mechanically. This way is better to me since you dont have overlapping geometry when you do a shell on individual lofts and assemble or unite them later.

This shelling is very important to me. I had to make copies of the lofts and scale them down and boolean subtract them from the original to "shell" this body. This only made the lofts hollow. Then had to trim away excessive planar geometry. In this situation it might have been really great if you could scale down a part respective to the XYZ axis. Are there any such way in MoI? Manipulating the bounding box of a whole body..?

Thank you very much.

Elrick

Hi Elrick,

> So the metallic lighting option would help best for surface inspection?

Yes, I think so.


> Are there any software capable of measuring minimum curvature in lofts or splines?

Rhino has a CurvatureAnalysis command that can measure min or max radius of curvature and display it with a false color display on the surface.


> If only it were possible to keep the curvature in a spline larger than the required shell this problem might be dodged then?

Yeah it would help to avoid this one category of problem anyway with offset surfaces becoming self intersecting.


> In this situation it might have been really great if you could scale down a part
> respective to the XYZ axis. Are there any such way in MoI? Manipulating the
> bounding box of a whole body..?

Well, there is the Transform > Scale command - that will scale an object uniformly along the XYZ axes around the origin point that you pick. But I'm sorry I'm not really quite sure if that's the kind of scaling you're referring to or not, you may need to explain what you're looking for in some more detail.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

"But I'm sorry I'm not really quite sure if that's the kind of scaling you're referring to or not, you may need to explain what you're looking for in some more detail."

What I meant is to have the ability to Scale a part in all three dimensions rather than uniformly. When a rectangle prism is scaled the offset between the, original and scaled, surfaces wont be equal. I will share examples when I have some time. Not entirely sure but I think mesh mixer have this function where you could adjust the l/w/h of the bounding box. That way, when you do a boolean subtract, you could have a much more accurate "skin" rather than shelling gone bad. The inside of this fuselage aren't a concern really. But I need to cut on as much unnecessary geometry as possible.

Thanks
Elrick

Hi Elrick, there are a few different ways you can do a "non-uniform" scale with different scale factors for X, Y, and Z.

The easiest is to click on the size line in the properties panel here:




That will bring down an "Edit size" panel where you'll be able to enter in new values for the bounding box size:



By default it will scale uniformly but if you uncheck the "Maintain proportions" checkbox that will then allow you to change x y z independent from each other for a nonuniform scale:


Another way is to go to the Top/Front/Right 2D views and use the edit frame to do a one directional scale, some info on that here:
http://moi3d.com/3.0/docs/moi_command_reference11.htm#editframe
That's when you grab the sizing handle and drag it vertically or horizontally, you will see a tracking line and when that's active you'll be doing a one directional scale. Repeat that in other directions.


The other way is to use the Transform > Scale > Scale1D command, which allows you to scale things in one direction. You can use this repeatedly on all of the X Y and Z directions to do a non uniform scale in all those directions.

Hope this is what you were looking for.

- Michael

Thanks Michael! Quite some options! I tried your first method mentioned. Quite funny how you can shrink this whole body down to just n few millimeters. Something not quite sound this way. I'll make sure before I post.

Will try the other methods tomorrow! This is totally what I was looking for!

Much appreciated,

Elrick