Seems you have that with the variable fillet! ;)

Yes, thank you, my result is nice also but hard to do it that way and slightly different. ;-)
Would be great if you could show me how you get a better outcome.

That function is quite impressive indeed.

Hi Jay - that's a somewhat unusual form to be trying to construct in a CAD program, you will probably be better off doing something like that in a sculpting type program like ZBrush / 3D Coat or in a sub-d polygon modeler.

It's hard for a filleting tool to make a good quality surface with such extreme changes in radius all happening in such a small space, and in fact in the first file that you attached the surface is poorly formed in many areas, such as this sudden bunching here:





Right now if that's the kind of shape you'd be trying to use it on I'm not really convinced that it would really work very well for it, it would be hard to avoid the problems shown above in your own example file.

Do you possibly have any other examples that don't involve such extreme fluctuations in them so I could get a better feel for where it would maybe work ok?

- Michael

Hold Line is also available in ViaCAD.
I've used it a few times where I found it handy to be able to control the size and shape of a fillet by altering its control line.


Martin.

-> "and in fact in the first file that you attached the surface is poorly formed in many areas, such as this sudden bunching here"

Yes, something destroyed my holdline as you can see, don't know exactly why.



On some parts it worked fine:



I could imagine for some automotive or package designs it could be useful to keep an exact form projected on a surface (in this case below an ellipse) witch defines the edge where the rounding should begin.
Or you have a nice fading between different sizes of a fillet. Don't really know if it is useful for industrial designs (I'm an architect), but sometimes when I see a form I think that way. :-)
Maybe someone else can give some hints where it could be an advantage to work with. I think its very comfortable to place different radiuses on an edge based on a form.

It is a sloppy result though. Thats one of me beefs with autodesys/viacad types.. they are so attractive with alot of powerful tools, but many of the functions will produce output thats no good for anything but it.... the main thing is the mixing of the 2 entity types that really just dont go together... my preference is to just keep them seperate... just to add, i own viacad pro 9 and have almost bought the autodesys stuff several times... they are very powerful packages!

For any variable fillets! ;)