hi,
New to using shells at work and ive just got this error message pop up and I was wondering what was causing it and how i could fix it?
'To allow the shell to complete, the level of checking between pairs of faces has been reduced. downstream operations that use this shell's geometry may have problems.'
Thanks in advance
Joe
The shell feature tries to be more forgiving of geometry conditions than the surface thicken tool, so, to a new user, it may look like it should be able to work with about any type of geometry. The permissiveness is a little misleading. Shelling will consolidate the offset geometry if a planar or cylindrical face is eliminated in the process, but it still won't allow a general surface to self-intersect and if the topology of the offset faces is too complex, then it might balk. So, as a general practice, make your model from as clean and simple of surfaces as you can manage prior to shelling and move features that have collapsing cavities after the shell feature.
My specific recommendation for your case is that you investigate the minimum radius of curvature of the part and make sure that it's greater than the shell thickness. You can do that using the Check tool in the Tools menu. Since your product appears to have some C2 surfaces, you might use the curvature and zebra stripe tools to make sure there aren't any cusps, singularities or ripples in the surfaces of your part (usually caused by high tension splines.)