Page 3 of 4
(continued...) In addition to lofting between a series of profiles comprising sketches, wireframe curves, curve lists, or face edges, lofts can also use a drive curve and options to add scale, twist, profile blending and profile influence.
A common error with sweep and loft operations is self-intersecting geometry.
The Tie Self-intersections command attempts to remove self-intersections and inverted regions on selected faces.
There is an excellent set of fillet tools and supported model cases including constant and variable radius with options including corner set back, roll along edge and conic arcs although the later repeatedly hung my installation.
Variable fillets benefit from being able to assign radius values at any point along an edge rather than being limited to existing vertices or nodes.
Should a solid filleting operation fail, the successful elements can be displayed.
Surface detail can now be created using an external raster image file as a height map to emboss a face.
The prescriptive file handling regime is apparent in the need for the height map file to reside in the user directory from which VX is being run.
Other useful surface creation methods include N-sided patches from 3 or more wireframe, sketch, or face edges and Curve Mesh created by blending through a mesh of U and V curves.
In both cases there is an option to force boundary edges to be tangent continuous with mating faces.