Hi Pilou, it's going to be extremely difficult to try and calculate a thickened shell for a shape like that with so many little fragments to it especially with the fragments touching each other at slightly sharp creases. When you have pieces that meet each other at a sharp crease, the offsets of each surface do not touch each other and that then involves trying to extend and intersect the offset surfaces which can be a complex calculation.

It's further made more difficult by having many surfaces made up of surfaces with one side squished down to a single point in order for the surface to have 3 sides. It actually still has 4 sides but one side is degenerate and such a surface is difficult to extend along either edge that touches the collapsed point area.

So it's just a tremendously difficult thing to try and offset very well in a CAD program.

Maybe your best bet is probably to convert it into a polygon mesh format and use a mesh offset function in a polygon mesh editing program.

- Michael

OK !
<< Maybe your best bet is probably to convert it into a polygon mesh format and use a mesh offset function in a polygon mesh editing program.

Of course the funny thing is that is from a polygon program that this model is becoming! :)

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7250.5 and following!

It was for reuse it in Moi! :)

Maybe intersection - boolean diff of a box + 2 differents sizes of the surface ? :)

Hey Frenchy,
Well that surface is pretty bad, so it leads me to believe you can take some liberties with it? If it is some type of bad product from a 3d scanner that needs to be "exactly like that" then this may not work for you.

But, you CAN get a result by running a plane down the center of the object and intersecting curves. Take one half of that result and offset it, then revolve them and do the Boolean to get something like this:



But this DOES deviate from the other surface, which has some detail that differs in the quadrants....

Yes of course!
It was just a theoric process for see if it was possible to "directly" transfert the result of the vortex program (polygon) ! ;)
(with the 2 Max Smirnov plugins: import OBJ and Subdiv)