Hello.

I have a big problem working with some imported surfaces, trying to use the thicken tool to convert them to solids.

The surface breaks up into individual patches/faces on the thicken tool preview, and it gives me an error, so it won't complete the task.

A solidworks engineer told me its because neighboring surface faces are not tangentially aligned at the edges, so when shifted, they break apart, so he suggested to trim those troublesome parts a bit, then use boundary surface to close them with tangency checked.

I did that, but its still not a full proof method. I still get the error some times with the Thicken tool.

The surface comes from Rhino3D, and it was originally a polygonal mesh (quad polys only) which was converted to spline surface model through T Splines) and saved to IGS format.

So I have a lot of organic looking surfaces, waiting to be worked further in solidworks, but because of the thicken tool issues, the whole process is falling apart.

Do you guys know any reliable workaround to this, or any fix?

Thanks.