Thanks for answering all my points Box .

I had managed to use the method suggested by Dukejazz of copy and then scaling (that was before I had seen your first post). The next problem was that I needed to add a lip all the way round the inside and ultimately fuse the two together. However, What I have created just doesn't seem to want to be a solid. I have Softened/smoothed all the lines and it seems to select as one surface now. There seems to be a surface closing the gap between the two shells. I have selected the whole thing and made it a Group but still get the message about one or more components not being solid.

Any tips or ideas on what might be going on here?

Think I might go back a few steps and re draw the shell with simplified curves as per your suggestion and see if I can get it looking a bit better. Be nice to smooth out some of those ridges...

Hi Mac1,

Thanks for that, will see how I get on but might take a look at TIG anyway. There seem to be so many plugins out there, its sometimes hard to find the right one first time.

Thanks again to everyone for your help and advice. Much appreciated.

Nick

Hi Box,

Thank you for taking the time to have a look at my problem. This is all great advice and will help me learn how to approach this sort of thing the right way. I guess the reason my curves were too complex was because I added in too many point to try and create the shape I was after. I ended up using bezier curves to do this. Once you have the shape you want is there a way to combine the segments into a simpler curve?

Interesting point about needing to scale it up by another factor of ten, I will try that.

I originally built it as a half of the whole shell, the same way you have done, and then mirrored it and joined it. I also tried to explode and soften all the edges but when I tried it it seemed I had to select each tiny line one at a time to get the soften action to have an effect (the line went from solid to dashed) I couldn't select multiple lines and soften them together, at least, they didn't go dashed if i did it that way.

I tried to turn it into one face by erasing the formers but it just ended up erasing a whole panel. I thought that to join two separate faces you simply removed the joining line. The idea being that if it was one face I could apply the Joint Push Pull to it in one go and not get the gap problem shown.

As for the reversing the faces to make the colours white on the inside, blue on the outside, you have shed light on another thing that was puzzling me. I had no idea why some were one colour and some another, thanks.

I will have another go and apply all the point you have raised.

Once again many thanks for your time and help.

Nick

Hi Dukejaz,

Thank you for the speedy reply.

No I don't think its a volume yet, its just a skin/surface with no thickness.

I will try the copy, scale method you explained (I'm on a Mac) and see if that works.

I assume from what you said that scaleGroupFloat_dj Ver 1.6.5 wont work on the mac OS.

Here is the skp file. One thing I didn't mention in my first post was that I have already scaled the whole thing up by a factor of 10 as I was trying to use Soapskin Bubble at first and was getting strange results when working at actual size.
As such I am in fact looking to make it 20mm thick in the current file.

Thanks again.

Nick

HT1.4.skp

Hi All,

First time posting here so please forgive me if I am not familiar with the protocal
I have created a shape using curviloft ( great plugin!) but it has no thickness to it. I want to now make the whole surface 2mm thick. Its the shell for an enclosure for a project I am working on and the intention is to have it 3D printed.

I have tried using Joint Push Pull which almost worked but suffered two problems:

1. It seemed to have random points which just didn't conform and would end up way out of place as spikes on the surface.
2. Would only work if I applied it to small sections at a time. As it turns out I created the shape panel by panel anyway, applying a skin between each of the formers, so I was able to use Joint Push Pull on each of these, however, this resulted in a gap forming between the now thickened panels at the joints.

I am assuming it is a result of the way I have gone about this and I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction to a simpler solution.

Here are a few screen grabs of the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help

Nick