Uniform thickness for complex body with shell command?

[brendoncoetzer]

Hi Folks, 

I've been following Jamie Scherer's Wii Nunchuck tutorial on YouTube. I successfully created the form (see images & model attached). 

When I shell the body, it creates an irregular wall thicknes (specifically in the corners) Is there a way to get around this, or can someone tell me if this is acceptable for manufacturing? I'm curious about how industrial designers would finalise a product like this to send it off for manufacture. 

[PinRudolf · Accepted solution]

That is an awful solution by Fusion. This should not be injection moulded due to cooling time differences between thick and thin walls. 

There is a real simple fix in this case though: You've created the body using the freeform tools: edit the freeform and use the thicken command to give the object the correct thickness. Wall thickness will be the same everywhere now. Big disadvantage though: this action is not saved in the timeline and is hard to edit. 

Another option is to use surface modeling, extend the surfaces out until they touch and fill the results. That is a proper timeline action but does take a lot of work!

Might be best if this will be reported as a bug actually. The used method for calculating Shells does not work well with Freeform models. 

[brendoncoetzer]

Thanks for that. I've yet to try it but I think your suggestion seems to be the best solution. I realised that I hadn't un-creased the edges, so I did that and came up with the intended result, although in some instances I might want hard edges? In that case, I might be able to split some faces and sweep along a path with a sharper profile. 

[Design4SZAM]

But what if you want to maintain the crease in your design ?