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Why does does the Fillet Edge tool not work?


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The Fillet Edge Tool only works in very limited circumstances. Why has it not been fixed? There seem to be plenty of posts letting you know about the problem, many from over a year ago.

Is there a patch?

Will there be a patch?

If not, why not?

Christian

XP Pro

VW 10.5.1

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The 3d tools have been improved with speed and accuracy in VW 11.

If you have a specific instance in a file where the fillet is not working, please send a file in with a description and I can look into it.

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Katie

Thank you, I will send the file.

I am sure that VW11 is better, but that is not the point. If you bought a car and the windscreen wipers did not work, would you expect the manufacturer to fix them, or would you think it reasonable to have to buy the next model if you wanted working windscreen wipers?

Christian

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Christian, this topic has indeed been going around a while and I believe the real problem is not Vectorworks, but rather a lack of communication of the particulars of how the fillet tool works. Let's use your windshield wiper example. What if you took your car back to the dealer complaining that the windshield wiper didn't work only to find out that you had to turn two switches simultaneously to get them to come on. Ridiculous I know, but in the above example, the problem wasn't with the wipers, but with the communication of what what involved to get them to work...there was a little more than meets the eye. Vectorworks target market does not have the 3D modeling background of industrial designers, or animators who work extensively with surfaces and filleting, and there's a little more to getting that fillet tool to work than appears on the surface, or is explained in the manual.

There are some very particular things that have to happen for the fillet tool to work properly and the way Vectorworks retains the creation history of an object often interferes with getting the fillet tool to work. Sometimes you have to forego the creation history and convert your model to nurbs, ungroup, then "add solids" to be able to fillet entities.

So my perspective is this...until a relatively thorough work is written explaining surface-surface interaction, single and dual sided surfaces, edge and face directions, self-intersecting surfaces, etc. then I see much confusion on the part of most users. A simple update won't solve the problem.

Before VW came out with the 3D powerpack, I used a surface modeling program that used nurbs extensively and learned the "rules" of modeling there. I've tranfered that knowledge to VW and have had very good success with the fillet tool since.

Unfortunately, I can't offer a simple solution because there's a lot to it, but maybe if you're having trouble, you could describe your model and situation and we can figure out what's going wrong. The most common problem I see with the fillet not working is the status of the object as shown in the OIP is not compatible.

[ 06-24-2004, 11:02 PM: Message edited by: tom kyler ]

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