Is there some reliable way to translate surfaces into “solids” to show plate thickness.
In the attached file I have a polysurface composed of 4 planar surfaces.
I want to use this as a basic for a structure made of 3/8" plate.
If I do an offsetsrf, I get all kinds of weirdness. At the side bend I get this.
At the center I get this:
What approach should I take here to depict the plate thickness?
Offset Problem.3dm (3.1 MB)
do you have ‘round’ checked for your corner option? If I do that, seems to give acceptable results.
I normally do not use round. That was just the setting when I copied the shapes to a simpler file.
Look like visual artifacts from too coarse a mesh setting. Do you see the artifacts in wireframe mode?
I see the same thing in wireframe. What started me on the problem is that I need to get a pipe to follow the edge. I was trying to do that using sweeps using the edge but the offset edge ends up jagged causing all kinds of problems.
hi jim, this is something which also drove me to the moon and back many times. in cases of surfaces hitting each other at angles the phasing gets skewed. only way around is the manual way.
i usually explode the surfaces and offset each separately. those which then overlap already i intersect and use the intersecting curve to trim each side off. the other surfaces which do not touch i use ExtendSrf on till they overlap, then the same procedure intersect and trim. to close up you loft each facing edge separately around the perimeter then join all together. its a few clicks in your case a minute work, the best i can offer.
sometimes also ConnectSrf helps instead of ExtendSrf with surfaces which would hit each other at a correct angle. but all those are vague sometimes it works sometimes not, so the procedure as described above works best IMHO.
It would be great if there were a “WELD” command that filled in such gaps.
if you rebuild your input surfaces or the actual curves you created it with, with something like SimplifyCrv and get rid of those overshoot fillets seen on the picture below which look a bit odd to me, then you can use EdgeSrf for each quadrangular surface and join them all together, offsetting works then on the entire joined surface.
by the way there is a MergeSrf. i am not sure what this weld should do you depicted. there is weld for meshes.
