Chapter 27: Working with Surfaces
- Create Lofted Surfaces all the way around the part, linking all the tubes.
Figure 27.28 shows the part with three of the lofts already completed and the last one in
progress.
FIGURE 27.28
Adding Lofted Surfaces- Start a Planar Surface feature, and select the open ends of each tube where the faces
were deleted in Step 4.
Note
Not all features allow you to operate from multiple bodies, but the Loft and Planar Surface features do.
Features such as Fillet and Draft restrict you to creating features that are associated with one body at a time. n
- Start a Knit Surface feature, and Shift+select all the bodies in the Surface Bodies
folder (select the first body in the list and Shift+select the last body). When you
click OK to accept the feature, notice that the number of surface bodies changes to one.
Selecting bodies in this way is much faster for large numbers of bodies than selecting
them one at a time from the graphics window.
Note
Notice that the open edges of the surface body are shown in a different color. At this point, there are two open
edges around the holes at the intersection of the tubes. n
- This is a situation that the Fill Surface is really meant for. In fact, this technique was
created specifically to take advantage of the Fill Surface capabilities. Right-click any of the
open edges and choose Select Open Loop. Initiate the Fill Surface. Change the Edge set-
ting option to Tangent, and make sure that the Apply to all edges option is selected.