Full Version: best practice for cleaning up a model question

Hi all

I'm closing in on finishing this model for export as an stl ,I have tried to remove over lapped lines and curves and tried the boolean commands but just can't
seem to join it as a whole.

Any help would be appreciated.

John

Attachments:
neck project.3dm

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Clean up all "disjointed" surfaces, (you got some in there). Then boolean union the structures together, bit by bit.
Seems to work here.

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Hi John, there are a whole lot of little slivery surface pieces that you'll need to get rid of.

So for example I selected these surfaces by clicking on them, not by window select so as not to capture the slivers too, then hide:





All these things that look like curves are actually little slivery surfaces, basically surfaces that have all their surface areas trimmed away. You don't want to have these things in your model so they should be deleted.

Something that you're doing is generating a lot of these as a bad side effect, like maybe something that is trying to intersect 2 surfaces that are already sharing an edge. Usually it's best to use the Join command to glue together 2 surfaces that touch each other and not a boolean command because Join only glues together edges and doesn't try to intersect things and remove material like the booleans are focused on doing.

- Michael

Image Attachments:
john_slivers1.jpg  john_slivers2.jpg 

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Hi John, one thing that can help is for areas like this:



To get those pieces to connect well it can be good to have the surfaces extended so they push through each other by some amount rather than having their end curves just barely skimming on each other:



- Michael

Image Attachments:
john_extended1.jpg  john_extended2.jpg 

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Hi John, attached here is a cleaned up version that's all joined into a solid now.

I made the juncture area by having these extended surfaces to trim against each other. That's often a good method to make sure pieces will join cleanly.









- Michael

Attachments:
neck project2.3dm

Image Attachments:
john_extended3.jpg  john_extended4.jpg  john_extended5.jpg  john_extended6.jpg 

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Thanks I'll try it again.

Have a great day
John

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