Here I expose my inexperience / ignorance...
I have a surface that I want to place a fill pattern on half of... So I split the surface with a sketch and create my fill pattern. Now I want to make the original surface continuous again. Any suggestions on the best way to do this?
Thanks!
-Nate
You can try to delete the surface on either side of the line, and choose "delete and fill" or "delete and patch".
If "delete and patch" doesn't work for one of the entire existing faces, then what would almost certainly work is to make another split line some small distance away so that there is a small rectangular surface in the middle of that face, then delete and patch that small rectangular surface.
Nate,
I just tried a quick Delete Face on a test part and had no luck. What worked was to make a sketched rectangle to form the boundary of the fill pattern, same result as split face.
Or you could just leave the split there, it shouldn't hurt anything. If you are worried that your boss might get flustered that it isn't one continuous surface you can just hide tangent edges when you show him/her the model. If you want to show tangent edges on a drawing and don't want that line to show up then you can manually hide it, although I know that could be a pain if you need to do it in a lot of views.
Try "delete and patch" not "delete and fill".
Can you post the part?
Hi, Nathan:
I assume you talk about surfaces on a solid model. You can make a rectangular sketch across over your split line on the surfaces and extrude the rectangular sketch inward to create an extrude feature, Solidworks kernel will "absorb" those two surfaces and create a new surface to replace them.
Good luck and have a nice weekend!
Alex
Alin,
I tried all the combinations of Delete face on a little test part that looked sort of like Nathan's picture. No joy. So I just deleted the Split Line feature and changed it's sketch from a line to a rectangle, then edited the fill pattern to use the rectangle as the fill boundary. I also had to edit the sketch plane for the little bumps since I had made it after the split face, but that was simple enough. Without adding more features, that seems to be the simplest way to go, unless there is more to Nathan's part than meets the eye.
Thanks Erik - I kind of feel stupid because Pro/E allows you to "fill pattern" into a closed sketch. I should have tried that. Right now it seems like a very obvious idea.
Thanks to all the others, too. Lots of good ideas to keep creative modeling alive!
This forum rocks!
-Nate
split it into 2 bodies then use the combine tool to add back together, should make it one surface again.
combine works because it is merging the faces the match back together as one.
see pics with tree, will include model
There might be no need to split the part. Simply draw the boundary sketch and use that to define the fill pattern. Attach is a simple example.
Alin,
I tried all the combinations of Delete face on a little test part that looked sort of like Nathan's picture. No joy. So I just deleted the Split Line feature and changed it's sketch from a line to a rectangle, then edited the fill pattern to use the rectangle as the fill boundary. I also had to edit the sketch plane for the little bumps since I had made it after the split face, but that was simple enough. Without adding more features, that seems to be the simplest way to go, unless there is more to Nathan's part than meets the eye.