Hi @menno , with “single-span modeling techniques” I meant the typical high-quality Bezier surfaces that are manually enhanced by point editing. I consider the new “Patch” as a back-up tool for filling very complex holes, but from my experience so far in most cases it can’t compete with the controllable nature of the single-span surfaces matched with “Match surface”.
Perhaps adding a new option called “Relax” would help to mitigate the unevenness of the patch surfaces. Not to be confused with “Stiffness”.
The “Relax” option should take into account the general flow of the input edges and try to smooth out the patch surface in a similar fashion to avoid the sudden change of curvature in the middle area. I have tried many cases and most of the time an unwanted internal waviness is produced by the current implementation of the “Patch” tool.
You can observe the latter effect in this example, where I replaced my manually enhanced Bezier surfaces with new patch surfaces. The “Untrimmed” option is especially wavy, despite that the hole to be filled is relatively simple and the input edges have a relatively gentle curvature.
For this particular test I used the same 3d model which I uploaded in post #10 above.
Note that the Projected multi-span patch surfaces in the samples below are still very nicely looking when I turn off the “Zebra” analysis and switch to some shiny display mode or assign a shiny material. For less demanding projects, this is a great and easy way to make quick 3d models. However, for product design and especially cars, a “Relax” option for the Untrimmed patches would help tremendously.
Control points of the two “Patch” surfaces (GEC reports G1 of 0,015 degrees for edge #0, but the zebra stripes are way off visually):
Manually enhanced Bezier surfaces (not ideal, but still smoother):
