Filling in a shell

[rodfrey]

I feel like this must be easier than I'm making it be!

I'm making a male and female die for a sheet metal stamping.  I made the female part using normal cuts through extrusions, etc.

To make the male part, I first did a patch offset from the female surface.  I was left with this:

How can I fill this in?  I added a box to the bottom and did a union of the parts, so I've got this:

I also tried thickening the shell, but it would only thicken it a certain amount.

Thanks!

[James.Youmatz]

Hi @rodfrey,

One thing you could try is a Boundary Fill. If you were to enclose all the areas (similar to what you did by capping the top, but by using patches) and define all those parts as your tools, a Cell should be created which would be the inner area which would fill. Again, it is hard to tell from just screenshots, but I have a feeling this method might work well for you. I guess you could also try a Combine, which it sounds like you were trying, but I feel as if this way might be harder.

If you want you can share the parts with me and I can take a look and see if I can create a screencast showing how to do so! My email is james.youmatz@autodesk.com.

Thanks,

[James.Youmatz]

Hi @rodfrey,

So it was a little bit tricky to get this completely sealed off. What I did was first created a zero offset of the mold (it looks as if you had offset it a certain amount, not sure if this was on purpose for tolerance or not, but I used a zero offset just to demonstrate). Then what I did was patches all the holes so that my "Boundary" was completely filled. As you notice from my screencast below I decided not to cap off the top part of the mold. For some reason this was giving me issues so I just used a plane instead, which could be used instead of any of the patches I used. Then using Boundary Fill I was able to create the mold.

Hopefully this helped solve the issue! If it did, please feel free to mark this answer as a solution, that way others experiencing the same problem can benefit from this thread. If you have any more questions or would like some more clarification, please don't hesitate to let me know. I'm more than happy to help!

Thanks,

[rodfrey]

Thanks a million!  I was able to replicate what you did, but I haven't made it work when I have a non-zero offset.  The challenge seems to be making the end caps "seal" the shape.

The offset is the thickness of the sheet metal that will be pressed in the mold.

I'll keep working at it though, this got me further than I was!

[Oceanconcepts]

It may seem a bit kludgey, but another approach might be to thicken the surface outward- that may work at increased thickness- and use the resulting solid (and any bits that need to be added to make it work) as a tool to boolean subtract from your male die. Filling in surfaces seems as if it would be most direct, but if that causes issues coming from the reverse direction might work.