Converging Fillets

Fillets all converging to one point? Try using one of those handy direct editing tools.

We all know from the Essentials course, if your preview disappears then the success of a filet is extremely unlikely. This can be helped in some cases by making the fillet in another feature. However in some cases you still can’t seem to get what you want. I have recently been modelling a certain chocolate manufacturer’s packaging and came across the issue where 8 edges all went into the same spot – not once but over and over again. We have seen this previously on support as well and one of my colleagues suggested a very neat trick which I took advantage of so I thought I’d share.

My preview kept disappearing no matter how many fillet features I made and how many stages I did the fillets in:

The trick is to erase the intersections completely for the fillet command.  Effectively just extrude cylinders on to

the intersections of all the edges making sure these are merged into the body. This then allows the fillet command to easily do its job between the cylinders:

  Once happy with the fillets I then turned to the Delete Face command. This tool is very useful especially if you

have imported parts or want to delete a single face so you can knit another face in.

Delete - deletes a face from a surface body or deletes one or more faces from a solid body to create a surface Delete and Patch - Deletes a face from a surface body or solid body and automatically patches and trims the body Delete and Fill – Deletes faces and generates a single face to close up the gap

In this case however we will use it to delete the geometry created to split the part up. I simply selected the faces

of the extrusions and selected fill so the gap at the bottom would be filled, effectively merging all the many fillets together with a new surface. This process only added a few more features on to my feature tree and was fairly painless.

By Chris Green

Applications Engineer