From: MAT13
Hello
I've had MoI for a while, never really used it too much.. (Modo/Blender)
I'm getting into 3D printing now, so upgraded to v4 and have been testing it again, following online tutorials.. But I still need some help with some basic understanding of the workflow I guesss..
There's something I can't get to work properly, which is to create new solids from copied elements.. I'm not sure i understand the difference ebetween the commands "Join" and "Merge", but in any case none of them work in this - I thought - simple example:
I copied the two surfaces from the base solid, joined the top edges with the planar tool, but impossible to do the bottom, I get many surfaces covering the whole circle.. In ther occurences I was able to to that, but impossible to make it a solid.. Is that not a valid method ?
(see screenshot and attached 3dm file)
Many thanks in advance..
Attachments:
closeshape.3dm
Image Attachments:
MoI_closeshape.png
From: Michael Gibson
Hi Mat, so it's doing that because the 2 edges are at slightly different z levels. So when the Planar command looks at them, it finds 2 separate planar curves to fill in, instead of one common plane with inner and outer boundaries.
If you select these 2 edges and then zoom in to the front view a bit you can see there is some separation there:
So the problem is that these 2 surfaces in your source solid are not quite on the same level:
Do you have any earlier stages saved so you can show me how that area was created?
- Michael
Image Attachments:
mat_planar1.png
mat_planar2.png
mat_planar3.png
mat_planar4.png
From: Michael Gibson
Hi MAT, also if the difference in z is small enough that it won't cause any downstream issues you can close it off using the Construct > Loft command instead of Planar.
To do that, select the 2 edges and then run the Construct > Loft command and uncheck the "Cap ends" option so it won't try to put end caps on it.
Then you can use Edit > Join to glue the pieces together into a solid.
The bottom will have a slight warp or something in it instead of being totally flat but it's pretty slight.
The other thing you could do is stretch out the inner and outer surfaces and then trim them with a common line at the level you want so they'll be on the same plane.
- Michael
From: MAT13
Hello Michael
thanks for the quick answer.
I see where the problem is, I used offset for the last operation and didn't snap it to the outer surface..
Is there a way to keep a tool live while typing the values? It would be easier to adjust..
Pascal
From: Michael Gibson
Hi Pascal,
re:
> Is there a way to keep a tool live while typing the values?
It depends on the tool but often times things try to finish up when a value is typed in to reduce the number of operations needed to run it.
For curve offset if you are in "Through Point" mode it will finish when you pick the point. If you are in "By distance" mode you can adjust the distance, it won't finish until you pick a point for which side you want.
- Michael
