Hi everybody, I have a question

[L3munoz]

Hi everybody,

I have a question I've been working on these days, and honestly, as I am a newbie in CATIA I cannot solve it. Here's the deal. I have a bunch of surfaces which define a closed volume, although actually no volume is defined in CATIA. What I want is to create a copy of these surfaces, resulting a new scaled (1.1, so bigger than former) volume, something from a normal-direction-scale. This is pretty easy, but what I want is that this new 'volume' is bounding the first one with the same distance all along it. I mean, I want like a bark or crust envolving the first one, but I am only interested on the external surface. When I tried by copying and scaling all the surfaces, the problem is that this distance is not the same everywhere as there are some surfaces I want only them to 'grow' in the normal direction.

I know there is a extra tool, Affinity, which allow you to fix how much each dimension varies by defining a new axis system. The problem is that as each surface has a different normal direction I don't know how to do it.

Any idea about how to deal with it? Maybe the solution is creating the volume and making an offset of it?

Thanks in advance,

/L3munoz

 

[weavedreamer]

If you are trying to add something like a constant thickness of paint, or plating what you are looking for is Thickness which you should find under Dress-Up Features. An offset of the volume would be another approach depending on the complexity of the original shape as fillets less than 1.1 will be reluctant to cooperate.

 

[L3munoz]

Thanks a lot weavedreamer, but this option is unable. Should I first create a volume or body or something. The set of surfaces was created in wireframe and surface design. The thing I did was to heal all the surfaces into one, and then close it, but I failed (CATIA says "an opening in the selected body cannot be closed by a planar face. Check all body openings for planarity")

 

[weavedreamer]

The Thick Surface option allows for the creation of individual (or joins of) surfaces. Unioning the results together and eliminating the void within might be another approach. Otherwise, the volume must be closed to create a body from.