Problems sculpting a parametric body

[Anonymous]

Hello - I'm working on an extrusion die and I can't quite get it the way I need it.  I created the following with parametric modeling:

It started as a cylinder with an egg-shaped through-hole, then I dished out the top with a revolve and finally used a variable radius on the inside edge to help control the flow of material.

This is 90% of what I need, but I now need to tweak the variable radius more than that command will allow.  I want to be able to free-form sculpt around the inside hole.

I first tired creating a form and converting the variable radius to t-splines.  That sort of worked, but since I couldn't match my new form to the dished area I couldn't split the body.  Next I tried converting the dish, the radius and the inner hole to t-splines, but when I select the dish I get this:  

For some reason I can only select half of the dish area.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here?  I'm fairly new at sculpting but trying to come up to speed.

Thanks,

Kent

[paul.clauss]

Hi @Anonymous

Thanks for posting! It certainly seems like you should be able to select the entirety of the dish area - would you mind sharing the design with me? If you'd rather not share the file publicly on the forum feel free to send me a public link in a private message.

I look forward to hearing from you!

[Anonymous]

PM sent - thanks!

[paul.clauss · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous

Thanks for sending the file over! I was able to have a look this afternoon and found some interesting behavior - I think you have helped us identify a bug in which conical faces are not converted to t-spline bodies correctly. I received the same results as you did in your file, and received some other strange behaviors when recreating in a new file. I will be logging a ticket with our development team to investigate this behavior.

While I was unable to find a way to get the face to convert properly in your model, I was able to identify an alternative workflow to help you avoid it. I have shown this in the screencast below - you could convert the faces of the hole below the fillet into a t-spline body and merge them in the same way that I did with the conical face above the fillet if necessary for your design. If you need help moving forward from the surface I created feel free to ask!

Please let me know if you have any questions - I'm happy to help!

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for this detailed walkthrough!  I'll need to re-watch it several times until it sinks in, but I'll be working with the model today to see if this gets me what I need.

Thanks again,

Kent 

[TrippyLighting]

You did not have to delet these faces that you later on filled again with the bridge tool. you could have somplt]y welded these points/edges to the existing 'fillet' geometry.

that would have avoided the problem with the different segement count, which created the topology problem you encountered.