Spent half my day so far trying to modify an earthworks shape from CAD and retrieve a volume delta. I’ve been doing this for a few years now so have learnt a good few tricks, but even so this is often a very laborious process, or i’m just not skilled enough yet. But today has got me stumped. I’ve managed to get to 2 solids but can’t get them to split, trim or subtract from each other.
attched are 2 model.
Found too many issues trying to use Eneroth Terrain on the CAD surface, so finally draped a Sandbox mesh over it and worked from there.
Then used drape onto a flat surface and various tweeking to create a ‘negative’ of the new shape I’m wanting to find a volume delta. But these 2 solids aren’t playing the game!!!
So would really appreciate knowing what I’m doing wrong please? CAD Surface.skp (5.8 MB) Solids Not Splitting.skp (589.2 KB)
What software did you use to 3D model, Its quite messy. The red spots are reversed faces, you can´t see that with the texture style but on monochrome you see how bad it is. you also don´t have groups or components, it´s all loose geometry. I´m trying to fix the highway part of the model and will share so you can have an idea of how it should be done.
I was able to subtract your two solids with native solid tools, and a little clean up from solid inspector. original volume was 24689586152708.77 M3, altered volume was 24689586142906.18 M3, making a delta of 9802.59 M3. Is this what you are after?
thanks, but it looks like it’s still not working. if you zoom into the intersection before cutting you’ll see there should be over a 1-1.5m step at the toe of the bank after being cut. But it doesn’t look like your cut shows this?
thanks Francis
This is an Import from the road designers CAD model. We’re only at 30%design, so hence the messy model. I do group etc. using Tags where possible.
no need to clean up the model. Just trying to get the portion I’ve made solid to work.
But for this one I only extracted a portion of the model of the area I’m proposing a fill saving. then grouped that and and spent ages trying to work it into a solid. Eventually draping a square mesh over it an using this to get a solid.
tried scaling up 1000x
reversed faces
just can’t figure out why the cut isn’t working??!!??
I don’t know how accurate must be the terrain, I tried to simplify it and make it look more like a terrain using toposhaper, the other group had all the faces reversed and two tiny gaps that i fixed using solid inspector and vertex tools. On the image you can see the terrain with the other solid group subtracted, the second one is an instance of the terrain so you can see how the subtraction worked and the third one is a solid component of the terrain I made before the subtraction. Sometimes it´s easier to model everything from scratch than trying to fix a messy file.
awesome thanks Francis, much appreciated
That’s what I’ve learn’t too. I had a go at fixing, was taking too long so tried to wrap a Sandbox mesh over it and work with this. Don’t have TopoShaper.
Guess I must have ‘inherited’ some of the mess with the sandbox draping maybe?
but thank so much Francis, really appreciate your help
Ed
You´re welcome, I hope it could be useful for your project.
I haven´t used sandbox tools in years, the triangulation of the contour lines some time is not well done and you end up with a lot of lines that are hard to work with, toposhaper generates a quad mesh and already a solid if you explode the base. it may lose some details due to the way it handles geometry but at big scales those are barely noticeable, of course it´s possible to get a very detailed terrain if you increase the quad mesh count but it will take a lot of time to make it and it will add a lot of weight to the file.
thanks Mihai
Guess I need to get the wallet out. I’ve tried TopoShaper before, BoolTools looks good, but I don’t like spending extra and try battle away with native tools. Guess with these big messy CAD imports the paid extensions will save heaps of time.
