About Stitching (Repair and Construction)

Surfaces that originate in other CAD systems can have data inconsistencies or other irregularities that require repair. For best results, analyze surfaces before using them in the part environment. In the repair environment, use the Find Errors command; in the construction environment, use the Quality Check command.

Stitching in Repair, Construction, and Part Environments

The Stitch command differs in its capabilities and results in the repair and part environments:

Surfaces

Repair environment

Uses only surfaces.

Construction environment

Uses only construction surfaces.

Part environment

Uses only surfaces and quilts.

Operations

Repair, construction, and part environment

Analyzes and marks surface edges to show which can be successfully stitched into a quilt. Specialized tools repair data errors.

Browser

Repair, Construction environments

No feature created. Operations are not parametric and have no history.

Part environment

Stitched surfaces create a stitch feature and place an icon in the browser. Like other features, can be used in parametric editing operations, such as suppressed rollbacks.

Advantage to Selecting All Surfaces

In most cases, stitch all surfaces into a quilt or solid body in the repair or construction environment. (In the construction environment, you can then copy it to the part environment as a single body, or if necessary, a few bodies. In this case, use the All Surfaces option. To improve processing speed, this option does not highlight each selected surface in the graphics window.)

Once selected, you can analyze surfaces to identify the faces that cannot be stitched or have gaps, and then stitch the eligible surfaces.

Using Surfaces That Cannot Be Stitched into Quilt

When you use Stitch to analyze surfaces in the repair environment, the analysis results are shown in the preview as color-marked surface edges.

• Black edges are stitched to adjacent surfaces to form a quilt.
• Red edges in a quilt indicate free edges of a surface. Red edges also indicate the outer edge of the quilt if the quilt does not enclose a volume.
• Magenta edges are stitched to adjacent edges, but the joined edges are not tangent. You can use the surfaces; however, the near-tangent edges may not be suitable for some design operations, such as creating a shell.

If necessary, repair the surfaces to remove gaps or to make sure the edges fall within tolerances to create a quilt successfully.

Group Surfaces or Transfer to Different Group (Repair Environment Only)

In the repair environment, use the Transfer Surface command to select faces or bodies and move to a new composite or stitch to a selected body. You can also right-click a quilt in the browser and use the context menu command Add Surface to stitch a selected surface to the active quilt.