From the sublime to the ridiculous

I was listening to Mark Biasotti’s SWW10 presentation on Surfacing 301. Honestly, I have never heard more useful information given out to users anywhere. If you do surfacing, everything he said was right on the mark, and great stuff to know. I took notes while listening and picked up a half a dozen tasty morsels. Thanks Mark. Great stuff. Some of it is just factual information about how the software works, but it helps you make better modeling decisions. That’s what it all comes down to for many of us.

And now for the ridiculous.

How often does this happen to you? You get a feature that fails, and so you model around it. And yet you can’t delete it without taking out a bunch of other features. The SurfaceFill3 and the Knit9 are not used by any other features. Knit is obviously not used because it has failed. The Revolve1 and Boundary19 that supposedly depend on the Knit work fine without it. The Parent/Child dialog shows that the Boundary was the direct child of the Knit.

So. I’m a little anal about my models. I don’t like to send stuff with errors to customers. I’ve got to find the source of the error so I can work around it again when it happens next time.

Anyway, the problem in the end was that I used the great optimism option in the Knit command – “Try to form solid”.Gotta love software with optimism. When the feature worked, it merged with the Boundary (solid) that also used the “Merge result” option. Editing the Knit allows you to reselect other faces, but it does not allow you to deselect the optimism option. Sometimes you can change the faces used by a Knit to change its children, but I can’t get it to work at all this time.

So the fix in the end was to turn off the Merge option in the Boundary solid, then the Fill and Knit could be deleted, and then I turned the Merge option back on for the Boundary. Does this make sense? No, it doesn’t. It seems that body operations remember the children they would have had even after they fail. Now that’s a feature that needs grief counseling. Hopefully someone at SW will pick this up and fix it. Maybe I’ll have to resort to my usual way of getting bugs fixed, which is to show them in a presentation at SWWorld.

Do any of you ever run into stuff like this? How do you get around it? Do you just leave the error or do you remodel a bunch of features?

Anyway, the model I’m working on is a decorative piece with 193 features – mostly planes. I’m making use of the Boundary Solid for the first time in a production part for me. Here is a partial screen grab, just so you can see some of what I’m up against with this part.

I’ve wanted to do a sample decorative part like this for a while. Funny how getting paid for it is the best motivation of all.

Also, when I get some time I’m going to model some aircraft, I think an SR71 and a P51 Mustang. This is your warning! What are you gonna submit for the aircraft modeling challenge?