Creating a solid from untrimmed surfaces

Use the automatic trimming functionality to generate a solid from a group of intersecting untrimmed surfaces:

Note: The availability of this feature is license dependent.

1. Click Home tab > Selection panel > All Surfaces.

   All surfaces in the current model are selected:

   

2. Click Solid tab > From Items panel > Automatically Trim Surfaces to display the Automatic Trimming dialog:

   

3. Use the slider on the dialog to control how many surfaces are used for trimming and generating a solid.
   Tip: PowerShape estimates the proportion of surfaces to keep and delete. This is indicated by the initial position of the slider when the dialog is displayed.
   • Additionally, you can manually select surfaces to display the Face dialog. Use the following options to include or exclude surfaces from trimming:

     Keep — select this to include the surface when trimming. The surface is highlighted in green to indicate this option has been selected.

     Automatic — select this to let PowerShape calculate the option to keep or delete the surface with respect to your slider setting.

     Delete — select this to exclude the surface when trimming. The surface is hidden unless Show manually deleted surfaces is selected.

     

4. Click OK to close the dialog and generate the solid.

   

Note: The surfaces used to create the solid are moved to a new level when the trimming has finished. Additionally, the created solid is made active if no other active solids exist in the model at the time of creation.

Note: If the creation of a solid using the Automatically Trim Surfaces functionality fails, due to the input producing a Boolean error, the error reporting dialog used for solid Boolean operations is displayed.