I know that Fillet Edge is infamously temperamental and often takes a bit of work but I have been struggling away trying to model these puzzle pieces with a 1.5mm fillet for a couple days now and wondered if anyone had any advice for me.
The curves used to make the extrusion are taken from a real puzzle so that is why it is getting quite complicated. I have tried simplifying my curves before extruding as much as possible, but even when I do so when I go to fillet for some reason I get lots of these building lines perpendicular to the curve (not sure their technical term).
Is there any solution for this? I can and have added handles with varying radiuses at different parts of the extrusion but in some places the radius needs to be 1.5mm
The best solution is to analyze your curves and replace the areas where the curvature has a radius less than 1.5mm R and replace those areas with a true arc radius that is slightly larger than 1.5mm. Something like 1.6 mm.
You can do that manually with the split and fillet command or you can try offsetting the curves outward by 1.6 mm and then back inward with the same radius. The problem with the second method is it will make the curves more complex in the areas you don’t need changed.
The goal is to eliminate the areas of the curve where the radius falls below 1.5mm
CurvatureGraph may help find the areas with most curvature (lowest radius). The Radius command will quantify the actual radius at any point on a curve.
Another way that may be more efficient and precise for what you are doing would be to extrude all the curves and then use CurvatureAnalysis on the resulting surfaces. You can set the Min Radius in CurvatureAnalysis to 1.5 and 1.6 and then anything below 1.6 will show up. You only need to worry about the concave corners. A 1.5R fillet can wrap around the convex corners even if its below 1.5R. CurvatureAnalysis will give you a visual cue where any or all the curves need to be fixed to handle a 1.5mm Radius.
