Surfacing... just a nightmare

[Proterio]

As it turns out…

How to merge trimmed surfaces

@jen, i think doing it with one of the 4 tiles would be easiest. Create a surface and rebuild it, say using 6x6 points and degree 5. Then move the controlpoint U and V rows so the surfaces are constrained outside the trim (where the blue line is in my file). At this area the surface edges need to match so the control points need to constrain it there. Next turn points on for the surface and move the center control points vertically. If you then Trim with the red curves in my file from top view…

YOU CANNOT MERGE TRIMMED SURFACES… so now I have to rebuild all my trimmed surfaces from the curves of the trimmed surface edge I guess…

I am working on an object that has about 10 surfaces, 2 or 3 that are trimmed in complex ways. The resulting model must have NO NAKED edges for calculations like VOLUME:

The underlying geometry has tangential requirements for some edges but not for others. In the real world, the welder will join allthese edges since they are close enough. Tolerance is set very small because the calculations for tangency require this. Unfortunately this obviates the MERGE command.

Join will succeed, but there are still naked edges. Whats needed is FILL GAPS command that just filles in all the holes (which are at the sub mm level) with some rudimentary “just get it done” surfacing and thus removes the naked edges.

Going back through the modelling to get surfaces to be adjacent down to the tolerance, is akin to the last 2% of any project taking as long as the first 98%. Its impractical and not a good use of recources.