New beginner here, and I’ve read a lot and watched a ton of videos in the past couple days but I can’t figure this bit out:
If I have 3 entities (? I don’t know all the terms yet) like here that I want to ‘union’ together, I select and group each one and it tells me each is a solid. But when I go to union them, or I just go back to a previous entity, each is no longer a solid, and I have to explode and/or repgroup them. I’ve looked at all kinds of Solids topics but I haven’t seen this problem. Help a newbie off on the right path here, tell me what I’m missing please…
If each of your ‘containers’ [groups or component-instances] are reporting as ‘solids’ in ‘Entity Info’ that’s a good start.
However, combining them into a new ‘container’ [group etc] won’t result in a ‘solid’.
Even after exploding the nested containers, ‘solidity’ is unlikely if those parts touch at all…
A ‘manifold solid’ can only contain edges and faces.
So any nested ‘containers’ need to be exploded back to ‘raw geometry’.
But that ‘raw geometry’ must be correctly structured…
Every edge must support exactly 2 faces.
That means:
no faceless edges,
no edges around holes or as edges of shelves or flaps,
no internal partitions which result in one or more edges supporting three faces,
no otherwise seemingly solid forms sharing a common edge - e.g. two cubes touching on an edge.
Also all faces, should look ‘outwards’ - i.e. you should never see ‘back face colors’ - reverse any offenders…
I do have Solid Inspector… everything seems to be fine-- like I said and showed, I can make every group identify as a solid, whether touching the other objects or not, and I’ve been trying the same thing with simple cubes and other shapes just to learn these tools, but can’t get any of the solid tools to work on any objects.
The problem seems to be that after I make an object solid, then select another object, or even just click away from it, when I go back to it, it is a plain group again without the Solid properties. Triple-clicking once or several times brings it back to the Solid state again, but then I’m chasing objects around the screen trying to get them all to stay Solid to no avail.
Someone mentioned the skin on the spheres looked wrong, and that seems odd and unlike the tutorial videos I’ve been watching-- unselected objects turn green (or pale). The spheres are the same bright white as the tube thing when selected. Happens with cubes or any other shape.
I dunno if this even makes any sense, thanks for bearing with me…
