SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Part VII: Working with Specialized Functionality

FIGURE 30.13

Import Diagnostics helps you find and repair errors in imported data.

Sometimes the errors Import Diagnostics finds are things you can see, like missing faces, and

sometimes they are things you can’t see, like the edges of a face that don’t intersect or inconsistent

face normals. When errors can be found and repaired by Import Diagnostics, it is the best way to

go. In fact, whenever I import a model, I always run Import Diagnostics on it to make sure every-

thing is good.

Repairing import errors manually

Some errors are so big that the Import Diagnostics cannot fix them. An example of this type of

error would be when a face is missing altogether from the imported data. When something like

this happens, the only thing you can do is resort to surface modeling. If the import leaves you with

surface bodies, and it cannot repair them automatically, you have to be able to remove the bad

faces and replace them with new faces that you construct. This is all about using surface tools to

create the new face, extending and possibly trimming the new face to fit into the gap caused by the

bad face or faces, and then knitting everything together back into a solid. This may be an oversim-

plification of the workflow for manual import repair, but it is essentially the big-picture steps that

you have to go through to get the task done.

There is such a thing as models that are so bad that you can’t fix them, or that would not be worth

your time to fix. If automatic repairs don’t work, and simple manual repairs don’t work, the next

thing to do would be to go back to the source of the file and ask for better data.