I’m designing a French Country table that has ornate table legs with many curves. I’ve got my first design in hand, and created the 3D model of the leg. Now I need to make some changes. A few arcs need to be reshaped, perhaps new ones substituted, etc. I’m comfortable and adept at doing this with the 2D surface, not so with the 3D model. How can I rid the 3D model of its extruded dimension, i.e., return it to simply a surface?
You can “view hidden geometry” and try to select a vertical profile and extract that. Otherwise, I would recommend keeping a copy of your profile off to the side in the future in the event this happens again. Maybe someone has an easier/better solution, but this is what I would do.
Here is an animation describing what @DaveR said, which is how I interpreted your request. This gives a 2D “slice” of your complex curves that you can then re-work.
Yes, indeed! I have no idea why I did not save it as “profile” before adding the extra dimension. Thanks.
Thanks to all for the suggestions. I decided to just erase all the three D surfaces and lines, and now I have the profile back. FYI, I’ve sent along my file just so you could see what I was working with.Table Leg_01.skp (226.2 KB)
And the whole time I was imagining a lathed leg, with an intricate curved path on the revolved edge profile. But now that I see your model, I would have suggested a simple copy paste (Dave R) or even a push/pull to reverse the extrusion. Now my solution doesn’t make any sense. Haha.
Another way to get back to that one surface is to select it (double click) and then drag around the whole model with the shift key selected (cursor will show a “+” symbol) then hit delete. Everything but the original selection will be removed.
Or triple click/ shift double click.
Thanks! Great idea.
I tried the reverse push pull and I guess due to my inexperience either disappeared the whole thing, or left a very tiny bit of 3D.
In case you missed it.
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The Triple click/Shift Double click is particularly useful when you have multiple faces in one face.
The profile you want is already embedded into the 3D model… all you have to do is click on the profile, then use the copy-move tool (M, start move, then press control to create a copy) to move a copy of it out away from the extruded version.