Clean Up VW's Sloppy Solids Tools

[Kevin McAllister]

I've been working more and more with Solid Addition, Solid Subtraction, Chamfer, Fillet, Solid Section as my 3D models become more complex. It seems the geometry VW is creating can get messy after a few operations. Often it will be acceptable to work with within Vectorworks, but when exported all of the flaws show. Geometry that should be water tight is not.

Some of the issues I've seen -

- Solid additions retain internal geometry instead of becoming clean solids. This internal geometry shows when exporting as polygon shapes in various export modes.

- Worse still, solids that touch but do not overlap don't actually become a complete solid even though VW thinks they have. They leave holes/gaps which appear when exporting polygon shapes.

- Solid Subtractions flip some of the normals in a subtracted area.

- Solid Subtractions become corrupted, causing bad geometry if any other solids operation is performed on them.

These problems most often appear on export (C4D, STL). However they also cause the re-creation of Auto-Hybrid objects to fail if edits within them cause any of the above conditions.

Its amazing how important good geometry is when sharing between formats or when 3D printing.

Kevin

[Dieter @ DWorks]

Those solids have a history in VW, so perhaps it has something to do with it? I think it's better if you convert them to a generic solid, so that the history is gone.

[Christiaan]

Those solids have a history in VW, so perhaps it has something to do with it? I think it's better if you convert them to a generic solid, so that the history is gone.

The conversion process should really do this for the user.

[grant_PD]

Agreed. Solid subtractions show up with the subtractor as part of the polygon when exporting to C4d.

Sigh. If I could only have C4D's modeling capabilities AND have VW's 2d, VW's presentation, VW's worksheets, etc.

[Kevin McAllister]

Those solids have a history in VW, so perhaps it has something to do with it? I think it's better if you convert them to a generic solid, so that the history is gone.

I often convert things to generic solids. Sometimes it improves things but mostly the geometry problems remain if they existed, even after conversion. Something that has hairline spaces within it appears as a full solid but isn't really.

Kevin

[bcd]

Rhino has a Show Naked Edges command.

Something similar for VW solids modeling would be very useful

[Kevin McAllister]

I'm going to bump this wish about solids improvements.

KM

[PVA - Admin]

Agreed. I always have to run any exported 3D models from Vectorworks though Netfabb and repair their parts before slicing.

Having the 3D solids export processes perform more conversion to generic geometry/single objects automatically is more likely to come sooner than a revamp of how our solid modeling engine functions at its base level, so i'll submit those two concepts separately.

Does anyone have any files where they've noticed the export of one object becomes multiple separate solids afterwards to 3DS or STL I can submit as an example? (If not I'm sure I can mock one up, just wanted a real-world example.)

Edited October 14, 2013 by JimW