- A filled surface can be thought of
almost like a piece of saran wrap
and you're gonna drag that and stretch
that piece of saran wrap over a series of edges
and you want a nice smooth, filled in surface.
That's basically what we're gonna need to create here.
Now, you can use the filled surfaces with the basic
any type of user service modeling,
but you could also use em as a great helper
in solid modeling and that's what I'm going
to point out to you right here.
One of the biggest problems you're gonna run into
when you're doing multiple fill its coming together
is it won't look that great where they all merge together.
So, let's go over to features here
and grab out fill it command.
Now, I have this, basically this is just a
stack of blocks here and I'm gonna fill the corners.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and choose
a half inch fill it.
So, type .5 and right away,
we're gonna see a couple errors are gonna happen,
so if I choose this edge here
and then come down and choose this edge here,
it gives us an error right away.
It says, "Hey, I can't fill these two things together."
So okay, well how 'bout if I get rid of this one
and I say this one over here, also the same problem.
So, you end up with all these different problems
when trying to fill it because these edges
are trying to come together.
Let's go ahead and get rid of that one
and just fill up this top edge here.
Click on that and okay, that looks okay.
Then, let's go and fill it again.
This time, let's fill out this edge here
and then, we can do this one at the same time.
Nope. Again, problems.
So, we'll go ahead and fill that one in.
Then, I'll go back and fill it again.
There's the top and then finally,
let's fill this one here at the bottom.
Alright, so there's all those edges filled in.
You can see right here in this kinda intersection,
they don't really look good.
You got all these kinda intersecting lines and curves
and it has like a little bump in the center there
and it's really not what we want.
So, I wanna get rid of all those
and put a nice patch in there
that's real nice and smooth
and tangent to all those surfaces.
Basically what I wanna look at though,
is I wanna make sure that I have nice, smooth edges
and you can see this edge over here's pretty good.
This one up here's pretty good.
Over here's pretty good and here's pretty good,
but down here, I've got this little bump
and I wanna get rid of it.
To do that, let's go ahead and choose this face out here,
start a sketch and use a regular line.
I'm gonna connect from this intersection here,
just straight across.
There's my line and then, I wanna go to features
under curves and we use a split line command.
So, I'm gonna take this little line here
and project it over here on this surface
and cut it in half.
So, I use projection, that sketch,
this one and click okay
and what that does is just goes ahead
and chops that in half.
Now, I have individual surfaces here.
Now, what I wanna do is get rid of them.
So, go back over to surfaces.
Come over here to delete face
and delete face is one of the most powerful commands
inside of Solid Works
and what it allows you to do is just click on
individual faces and get rid of em all at once
and make sure we go ahead and choose all those
and then, go ahead and click on delete.
But, we also have the option here to delete and patch
or delete and fill, which is what we're gonna be doing,
but I wanna do them individually as steps.
So, just click on delete for right now.
Go ahead and click okay and there it is.
Now, as soon as I deleted those surfaces,
it basically takes that and says
hey, this is not a solid model any more
and it turns it back into a surfacing model.
So, I can look around and there, I can see the corners
and see what's happening here.
So, now I really just have a bunch of surfaces
as one big surface model.
So, what I wanna do is I wanna fill this in.
So, let's go up to filled surface
and choose my patch boundary.
Let's go up here and choose this first edge here
and make sure you're choosing the entire edge.
Go up here and choose this one.
This one happens to be three individual edges.
So, we'll make sure we pick all three of those
and choose a side here and notice as I'm choosing them,
it's also choosing the adjoining surface
to be tangent to.
As soon as I've chosen all those different surfaces,
then you can see what happens here.
It gives me a little preview of what's gonna happen
when it takes that stretching material
and stretches it over all those edges
and all those surfaces and what the end result's gonna be.
Now, I can also choose if I wanna just contact those edges
or if I want to make em tangent
or even curvature, bunch of different options
of how I want to patch that surface
and you might wanna play with each one of those
and they're all gonna give you slightly different results.
Once you have what you want, click on OK
and there it is.
Now basically though, I have a individual surface here
and it's still a surface body.
There's no solids here.
Two individual surfaces.
But if I go back to surface fill, there it is,
I have the option to say merge result
and as soon as I click on merge result,
it also gives me the option to try to reform a solid.
So, directly below that, click on try to form solid.
Click on OK and there you have it.
Beautiful new patch in the corner.
Very, very smooth, clean lines from edge to edge
and from fill it to fill it.
All one very simple thing and we're back to being a solid
so you can continue using all your favorite
solid modeling tools to further work on this model.
There it is, the filled surface.