Mesh Editing through Geometry Edits

The Quick Edit panel allows surfaces and washers to be split, change the category (shared, free, etc.) of edges, create or delete surfaces and points, project points, and trim fillets.  This can be utilized with the option to force the immediate re-meshing of surfaces after a topology change.

Mouse over the different tool names to see a short description.

Some of the entity selectors can be used in conjunction with the rectangular selection box (<shift> +click-and drag the mouse to select multiple entities).  These entity selectors include an "(s)" in the label--for example, line(s) rather than line.  In some cases either the right or left mouse button with the selection box is used to accomplish different tasks.

The midsurface panel allows the midsurface representation of a solid part to be extracted.  It can be used to generate a finite element shell representation of a solid geometry.  It can also be used with sheet metal stampings, molded plastic parts with ribs, and other parts that have thickness clearly smaller than width and length. The original geometry that is selected to extract the midsurface from remains unchanged.  The new geometry representing the midsurface is placed in a new component collector called Middle Surface, or in the current component, depending on the choice made.  The (variable) thickness for each middle surface is calculated and stored with the surface definition. For more information about the midsurface options, please refer to the Automatic Midsurface Creation Section in Chapter 2.

The defeature panel allows pinholes, fillets on surfaces and surface edges, and duplicate surfaces to be found and deleted.

Each of the sub-panels allows you to manually select the feature that you wish to delete, but also supports a three-step process that can locate such features:

Step 1: Detection - Select surfaces to search for pinholes, fillets, or duplicates; set detection parameters; find all features matching the criteria.

Step 2: Select/deselect - Fine-tune the selection to include only the features you wish to delete/remove from the model.

Step 3: Removal - Removal of the selected features.

The defeature panel includes the following functionality: