Hi Michael:

In the following file a problem exists with the fillet and the chanfer is not executed

Best regards

Juan Galvan

Hi Juan, your attached suela2.rar seems to contain an .obj file - could you please post the .3dm file for me to look at instead? Thanks,

- Michael

Hi Michael:

By mistake I included a mistaken file but the following one the the good one


Best regards

Juan galvan

Hi Juan, there are a few different things going on here.

First of all, there is a curve object right in that area, it will select first if you move over there and click. This will interfere with selecting parts of your solid or surface objects, so select that curve object and delete or hide it to get it out of the way so it does not interfere with your selection.

Next, the bottom and side pieces are different objects, you would normally want to join these together to make one solid object before chamfering it. However, in this case there is a problem with the join - some of the edges are close enough to join, but one pair of edges are 0.012 units apart which is not close enough to join, so after joining it does not form full shared edges in all places, that will interfere with chamfering.

But one way to make progress without joining is to use surface/surface chamfer instead of using edge-based chamfer.

To use surface/surface chamfer, select all those pieces and use Edit/Separate to break them apart into individual surfaces. Now you can select 2 surfaces at a time and run Chamfer on it, and this will succeed at creating chamfer surfaces. After that you will have to do some surface trimming to make progress.

I have attached here the results of doing some of this manual trimming, but you can see that there is some difficulty in the spots where the different chamfers come together - it can be difficult for MoI to automatically fill in corners like these. In this case you'll have to decide how you would like these corner areas to look and trim and create surfaces there to fill them in.

Actually it looks like the part that creates the most difficulty for chamfering is the place along the sides where 2 surfaces touch each other, they are not quite smoothly connected to one another, they meet at a creased angle but the angle is very shallow. This kind of situation creates difficulties for operations that calculate the intersection between surfaces, which fillet and chamfer do.

If you could construct that as one larger piece so that it is smoother it would probably be easier to chamfer it.

- Michael

Hi Juan, possibly a better approach for this situation is not to do an actual chamfer, but instead model the piece you wish to remove.

A chamfer has very precise properties, it will follow along the surface contours to the specified distances. In some situations this accuracy actually causes problems, especially since it creates difficult corners where different shaped surfaces come together.

By modeling a cutting edge instead, it is not as precisely defined - the distances of the final created edges from the original surfaces will not be constant like they are in a real chamfer. However, the generated surface will be smoother.

For this different approach, I started by drawing a slanted line like this:



Then I swept that line along the bottom curve that you had. First I made a slight modification to the curve by deleting the points where the side pieces came together, to make those areas completely smooth instead of having a slight crease. That creates this sweep, made of multiple surfaces:



Then I selected all of these surfaces, ran Edit / Trim, and pushed "Done" to cut them all with each other. Then I pushed "Done" again to keep all the pieces, and then deleted the pieces I didn't want to keep. Actually, I deleted just a few of those pieces until I could see and select the 2 long angled pieces, then selected those 2 and the other big pieces, did a Select / Invert and a delete.

After that the pieces can be joined togehter to make a pretty good result:



I have also attached the resulting model here as suela02_chamfered2.zip .

Even though it looks similar, this is not technically an exact chamfer since it is only modeled on the shape of just one curve and doesn't follow the surface at a constant distance by the surface offset. But it has some advantages over a proper chamfer, in that it is nice and smooth in that area along the sides where those surfaces come together, an actual chamfer would be broken up into different pieces right there and then connected by some little faceted corner or something.

Anyway, this may give you another idea on different possible approaches when chamfer doesn't do what you want.

- Michael

The other thing that is interesting about this other method of modeling the piece to remove, is that you can use different profile shapes.

Here for instance I drew a concave arc to cut a rounded inset groove around the edges:



- Michael