In some ways the manual nature of it works around some of the obstacles, like you won't manually select a little tiny surface as part of the surface/surface fillet, you will pick the ones where the fillet can possibly be constructed on.

Cool!
I'll try using the decrease fillet size trick later tonight!
My quick checks right now tell me I still get problems, but maybe I shouldn't rely on booleans too much... but it's so fast and sweeeet! :)

Just for reference, I attached a small test I was working on, I can fillet one of the parts, but not the other (the lower part in this case)
I tried the decrease fillet size as well on a couple of different boolean surfaces of this type :o)

Cheers!
Jens

Hi Jens, the lower part fillets ok over here up to a radius of around 0.75 . So you may have not quite gone small enough.

What I'll usually do is start with a really pretty small radius, like 0.1 and increase it in steps until it stops working.

Often times during this you can kind of see which fillet piece is causing the problem, like in this case there is one piece of a fillet that keeps getting smaller and smaller and when you go to 0.75 it is really pretty skinny - that fillet piece kind of evaporating is when it breaks. Here is a snapshot of the one I'm talking about, with the arrow pointing to it:



Also below that I've circled a different kind of problem - there is an edge in the model down there, and the fillet will be likely to fail if it gets big enough to where it would have to cross over that other edge. This is actually one of the biggest problems that I hope to get fixed up when I can get an update to the geometry library that I'm using.

So try a little smaller yet! One quick note - if you want to type in a bunch of different radius values, it is not necessary to click in the "Radius" box first, just type a number directly and hit enter. Once you start typing, your keystrokes will automatically go to the first numeric entry box in the command options area.

- Michael

> but maybe I shouldn't rely on booleans too much... but it's so fast and sweeeet! :)

Actually, it's fine to rely on the booleans... This really isn't a problem with the booleans, the problem is with the filleting mechanism...

Sometimes you can do a few steps to make things work better - like for instance if you're going to do a boolean with a cylinder, there is an extra "seam edge" that runs along one side of the cylinder where the surface comes to be closed. Sometimes it is possible to rotate the cylinder so that particular edge is not running right close to other things before you do the boolean, or even so that it won't be a part of the result since it will be in a trimmed away area. That makes less edges and less opportunity to run into the fillet bugs that won't cross interior edges.

- Michael

One other note about fillet size - it is really pretty easy to underestimate how much of a model a particular fillet size is going to consume when the model is made up of some narrow or concave type areas.

For example, here I've applied a fillet of radius 3 to your shape, by using Edit/Separate on the model to break it into individual surfaces, and then picking the inside scalloped area and then outside sphere surface. This does the surface/surface fillet operation instead of the edge-based one.



This is the same radius fillet as the little fillet pieces on the original shape around the eyes! But since there is a sort of narrow pointy area in the scalloped out shape, a fillet of that radius consumes quite a lot of the shape before it will fit, this would include eating up those eyeball parts entirely.

So it can be pretty easy to run into this problem where you are asking for a fillet that simply won't fit in the model at all.

That's why it can be a good idea to go down really pretty small if the size that you first try does not work.

- Michael

Awesome!
Thanks a million for your pointers, can't wait to get home and try some modeling again!!

Cheers,
Jens