Baffled— Can't Make A Face
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I've been banging my head against this wall all day. I'm trying to extrude a solid, but I can't even make a face on this figure.
As you can see from the file, I've got vertical and horizontal lines making a rectangle, and the rectangle won't form a face if you connect diagonals.
I've been trying to weld the curve but it won't take. I can even go over the outer rectangle with the rectangle tool and it still won't make a face.
Any clue what's happening? How do you folks debug something like this?
TIA,
JIm
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It just isn't quite planar. Somewhere along the way it got very slightly off being planar.
You'll have to rebuild, or flatten it. Seems like there is a flattener script?
Chris
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I selected the bottle shape and hid it. Then I erased the remaining left and right sides and bottom of the rectangle. That just left the top of the rectangle. Using the rectangle tool I reconstructed the rectangle from the top right down to the point of origin. This gave me a closed rectangle with a face. I pushed this back to make a rectangular solid. I then pushed the front face back just slightly. Next I unhid the bottle shape. Lastly, I pulled the front face of the rectangular solid back toward the bottle and you could see the vertexes of the bottle disappearing into the solid one after the other. This confirms what Chris observes, the whole thing is twisted out of plane.
Draw your rectangle first with the rectangle tool. You will get a face. Then either tilt the face forward 90 degrees or raise the rectangle to get a front face (then erase until you only have a simple front rectangle. Now construct your bottle on the face. When something does not close you can almost always assume that you missed closing a triangle or got something out of plane. Zooming in and out and rotating your model to confirm its shape will usually solve the problem. Repositioning constantly and checking connections and planarity just have to become part of your drawing procedure.
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CAN_MakePlane-1.skp
I do it a different way...
I Select all of the geometry and Rotate it 'flat'.
I Scale everything x10 - it is pretty small and I suspect that might be a contributory factor to not being able to see the problem readily...
I Move it up and draw a bigger rectangle below it.
I Select the rectangle's edges and use the Sandbox Tool 'From Contours' to make a mesh.
I use the Sandbox Tool 'Drape' to 'project' the shape's geometry down onto the flat mesh.
I Erase the previously raised original and then Explode the mesh and Erase the bits I don't want, including using Hidden Geometry 'On' to see any hidden/smoothed edges left from the mesh - which I Erase.
Now the whole thing appears OK and faced... BUT there is an S shape on the right-hand side that's showing as a heavier profile so it's still not part of a face edge-set: I Zoom in to it's ends and see that there are small gaps (not visible before scaling x10): I draw some temporary lines away from these gaps so I can find them later - this is better than just healing the gaps with little lines. Now I use the Move Tool with no selection, and I Move the ends of the edges to close the gaps and finally these rogue edges face properly. I erase the two temporary lines to tidy up.
I scale x0.1 and Rotate it back upright.
It's fixed...As Roger said drawing it correctly the first time is much easier...
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Thanks for the help with the workflow, guys.
I'd heard of Sandbox but never found it. I searched the Forum and saw that it needs to be enabled through Preferences/Extensions, which I just did.
I had assumed that when I was drawing on a flat surface the tools would select the surface, and was not orbiting to confirm.
I'm having other problems that this doesn't seem to cover. I'll post another thread with the issues I'm having closing rectangular faces.
Best,
JIm
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