Merge fillet edges back into the geometry

Rhino
,
1

Hi all,

I am working on an architecture project involving a house made of spheres (here a quick clay model I threw together as a concept)

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image1600×1200 325 KB

I am modeling something similar in Rhino, and I came to the step where I wish to smooth the edges between all the spheres

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image776×643 101 KB

So far I’ve been using FilletEdge, but it is making a mess (as usual), with many filleted surfaces defined as fully separate

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image652×602 78.1 KB

Not counting that the original volume is now open for some reason, which is annoying as I wish to 3D-print this thing

Therefore, I was wondering if anyone had a way to either integrate those fillet surfaces back, a cleaner method to fillet or maybe a different way to achieve my desired goal altogether (maybe something like ShrinkWrap but for NURBs and better)

thank you all in advance
(sorry for having split the file in two, but a single file was too big for the forum)

For_Forum_original.3dm (3.9 MB)

For_Forum_final.3dm (20.0 MB)

2

I had a similar geometry and I had to complete it manually by trimmig the extra part of the fillets and fill the gap by a 3 sides surface.

It may be a good challenge for the V9 new filler tool. @menno put this is the examples.

3

An interesting option could be to use the Spherene plugin

4

You have several different fillet radii. A fundamental rule of using fillets is to apply fillets from the largest radius to the smallest radius.

FilletEdge is very usefult when it works, and annoying when it doesn’t. You need to trim some of the fillets and spheres. It’s tedious and may take an hour or so. After you have everthing trimmed it should join without any naked edges. Let us know if you need help.

An alternative to FilletEdge is FilletSurface and then Trim as needed.

The objects in the two files are not aligned.

The objects are semi-transparent in Shaded display mode, as if in Ghosted or Xray display mode. Any idea how that happened?

5

Hi, thanks for the answer, I’ll keep in touch if I need more help

for the semi-transparent display: I just lowered the opacity of the layer, something I often do with construction/temporary surfaces and volumes as it’s sometimes more convenient to see through

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image620×462 46.7 KB

6

I think this is a very good case for BooleanUnion + ShrinkWrap: guaranteed closed mesh, get “fillets” by choosing a target edge length. The only thing that is not preserved is the hard edges that bound the planar surfaces.