Hi y'all,
trying to make an eye patch using surfacing.. I've tried lofting and boundary surfaces, and so far seem to have found boundary surface to work a little bit better, but thicken has given me a lot of problems and I've had to trim out some of the surfaces that didn't "tangencize" so well.. see attached part file..
Also thicken didn't leave a flat edge on outer rim.. I suppose I can trim with a plan to get it flat? Seems like a lot of extra steps, but I've not done much surfacing, so maybe that's the nature of the beast.
Is there a better way to do this?
The Boundary surface needs to start from a 4 sided patch. This is basic surfacing 101. You can force it to do other things, but it's like a teenager - it probably won't do a good job if you force it to do something.
If you really want to start from a non-rectangular outline, use a Fill surface with a control curve or point or something.
If you want to use the Fill and need to drive the tangency direction, first make the outline sketch - either a projected sketch or a 3D spline loop, and then make little lines establishing the tangent direction, and then make a reference loft around the 3D spline loop using all of the short lines. Then make the Fill surface using the lofted reference surface as the tangency control.
There are a lot of ways to do it. Most of them require some imagination.