Overlapping geometry

[karelslaby]

Hello, sorry for a very basic question but I can't wrap my head aroud this basi concept. How would I go about turning this shape into an extruded body? Either offsetting the whole ilne to one side to create profiles which can then be extruded, or extruding a surface from the line and then thicken it.

1) Offset only goes to one side - is it just not possible for some reason to offset a line that intersects itself?

2) Overlapping surface cannot be extruded... Why? Am I missing something? Is it just how it works?

[TrippyLighting]

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@karelslaby wrote:

...

1) Offset only goes to one side - is it just not possible for some reason to offset a line that intersects itself?

2) Overlapping surface cannot be extruded... Why? Am I missing something? Is it just how it works?

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Self intersecting geometry is a problem for many CAD systems.

This involves some trickery and isn't a straight forward workflow.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I believe this is something Solid Sweep may help. Try creating a cylinder at the start of the path. The diameter should be the same as the intended thickness. Then use Solid Sweep command to sweep the cylinder along the self-intersecting path. It should work.

Please ignore my comments. It does not work. Somehow Solid Sweep does not work with a segment-wise self-intersecting path. It should work. I am sorry for my false claim.

Many thanks!

[laughingcreek]

similar to what trippy did, maybe a little simpler. see attached.

@TrippyLighting , @johnsonshiue - one would think you could just do an offset to the spline in the sketch, but that doesn't work.  is this a bug?

[karelslaby]

Thanks everyone, those are some awsome tricks!

One of my use cases is just turning drawings into 3D prints. Looks like in any case that will be difficult since I would need to select a lot of different faces manually and/or manipulate it in different ways. But for simpler use cases those are all very useful ideas to keep in mind 🙂