Extrusion difficulty

Extrusion difficulty.skp (147.1 KB)
A project with a lot of classical moldings.
The first time I used the follow-me tool it worked fine.
But upon subsequent attempts my extrusions show the hidden geometry as black lines.
While I think I’m doing the same operation each time, apparently I am doing something differently.
Scene 1 on my model illustrates this.

Yes. That’ll happen. The curves get exploded during the follow Me operation. You can either use a plugin like TIG Weld to weld the curves back together before the next Follow Me operation of make copies of the profile before you run Follow Me so you are using a fresh copy for each extrusion. Or, just select all of the geometry after Follow Me has run and use Soften/Smooth from the Context menu to take care of softening the edges again.

Don’t forget to correct the face orientation, too. In your example the large side with the recessed panel is reversed.

Thanks DaveR.
Soften/Smooth worked like a charm.
I still kinda wish I understood why sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.
I reversed the face but still got black lines.

Follow Me will always explode the curves although Push/Pull doesn’t Follow Me has done that since its introduction.

Face orientation has nothing to do with whether or not you get the edges from the endpoints of the segments.

FWIW, you could have made all of the panels after a single Follow Me operation if you wanted.

Thanks again!
I have several more of these to make, and one is angled.
It hadn’t occurred to me to ‘follow-me’ all of them.
This will save me time and work!

You can run Follow Me on multiple faces at the same time.

Since they are all the same molding, you can do one, copy it and adjust the size as needed with the Move tool.

As an example, yours is on the left. I duplicated it on the right by copying the end shown selected. then I resized that end to make the large panel as well as the other narrow one. It would be trivial to rotate a copy to some other angle, too.

Thanks yet again.
Much better than the approach I was planning.

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