I have a model that I am trying to send out for tooling, problem is there are a couple of holes in the solid / surface skin and the toolmakers keep sending it back. I have been able to repair a few of the holes by adding solids of exactly the same profile as the hole, but have two that I don't know how to fix. Any help / sudgestions would be appreciated. Unfortunatly I cant post the model for obvious reasons, but I am including a screenshot of one of the problem areas.

How have other people dealt with this sort of problem in the past ?

Nick I think that's just the faceter
!?

Could be it fixes itself if you change the resolution ?

The guys at [URL="http://www.shapeways.com/"]http://www.shapeways.com/[/URL] recommend Meshlab [URL="http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/"]http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/[/URL] for this. It won't run on my machine so I haven't tried it yet.

billbedford,
Thanks for the meshlab thing, but it looks like it will only work on poygonal mesh based models and uses formats like OBJ that I dont have in CU4.

Nick,
I tried the offset zero surface and that has worked in two of the three cases. Changing model resolution fixed a third area as Jol sugested, but I still have one very stuborn hole. I have tried offseting a zero surface, thickening it into a solid and booleaning, but that does not work. Also tried offsetting the surface 0.001 and thickening and that also did not work. Ofseting the surface 0.1, thickening and booleaning did work, but I end up with an ugly bump in the surface. Unfortunatly using the move surface tool failed to clean things up.

Paul,
Thanks, that's what I did when created a zero offset surface that I then added to the main solid. Unfortunately that simple fix did not work for all instances, which is why I reverted to creating an offset surface / solid that I then joined to the main solid.

Thanks eveyone for your help on this.

Issue now is that everything looks good (or good'ish) in CU, but the toolmaker is still bitching and moaning when they open the file in SolidWorks. I guess you just can't make some people happy.

I must say that I am really looking forward to that native SolidWorks export that is coming in Shark V6 :rolleyes:

Some people aren't happy unless they're unhappy! How come they're not using the purported immeasurable power of the software they paid big for just to impress you? It's amazing that a nominal service bureau can't or won't invest the few minutes work to rebuild a face or two (from your pic it's not too difficult to figure what's missing) to facilitate the service you've gone to them for. I have a mental picture of people sitting on their chuffs bitching about jobs going offshore and wondering why....

Tim,
The holes in the solid surface appeared after I booleaned a bunch of parts to the solid that contained the facet. The facets were previously good. Generally I find that the more complex a model becomes the more likely I am to get these sorts of random issues. The problem is so great that we had to send the part out for tooling without adding all the required fillets as things become even weirder. (Sorry hard to explain, but the model appears to invert from solid to a wire frame that was the complimentary color to the solid blue goes red red. Every time I try and move this wireframe on screen the beach-ball appears for 30 seconds so I quit at that point.).

I tried upgrading to V5.5 months ago, but gave up as the Authorization number would not take. I spent a few days going through this with tech support and we tried a bunch of numbers, but always the same problem. Shark would launch in my admin account but required re-authorization every time. In my user account the same authorization number would not work at all so I was limited to demo (no saving or export) mode. The project was started in CU4 (ACIS 17) and I am loath to move over and create incompatibility between files.