Hi All,

I'm currently working with a client who designs surfboards in MaxSurf. He exports the geometry to me in IGES format and then I use this to form it into a solid and add some internal geometry.

He has a catalogue of boards of different shapes and sizes and they seem to import and build with varying degrees of success. Typically the boards have three surfaces, a base (the bottom of the board), the deck (the top of the board) and the rail (the surface around the board periphery that links the two.

The base and rail surfaces almost always build fine and are easily convertable into usable geometry, however, the deck surfaces are much more problematic.

I've identified some artefacts in the way the decks are modelled with him that's causing some issues, and we're working together to rectify these, however some of the surfaces that should be usable just don't seem to be for some reason.

In the attached model, there's a very small flaw in the deck near the nose of the board that trips things up, and the surface at the tail of the board runs down to a singularity which is never a good thing.

I have managed to convert some of these models to usable geometry by cutting off the nose and tail of these surfaces and blending in filled surfaces to remove flaws and singularities, but then trying to thicken or offset these surfaces, I'm still getting errors. I've run the check function and there aren't any tiny radii there that I can see, am I missing anything else?

Are there any simple fixes I'm missing here? I've got a whole catalogue of these to go through and work with, so I'd like some simple suggestions in how to turn the board surface IGES models into usable solid geometry quickly. If I spend a day on each board model, I'm sure I can make them good, but I think that'll blow the project budget out of the water. Ideally I'd like to write a macro to automate the process once I find how to make them good.

The client is also re-doing a lot of their surface modelling so I'm hoping to give him some feedback on how to better build his surfaces to integrate with SolidWorks if possible... so any advice on that front would be good too.

I've attached a sample IGES file if anyone wants to have a play.

Thanks in advance,

George.