Making a 3D object from a open line sketch

[Anonymous]

I want to create a 3d solid from attached sketch. Tried with pipe, but lines are intersecting with each other. Also tried with extrude, but it only gives height without wide. Any ideas?

[jeff_strater]

what do you want the output to look like?  You might try TSpline Pipe, but it's not clear that will give you the result you are after.

[Anonymous]

i would like the result to be thicker in both X and Z dimensions, so exactly as i could use sweep or pipe functionality.

[g-andresen]

Hello,
please share the file and explain with a picture of a real object what you want to achieve.

Make sure that the contours do not touch each other at the intersections but swerve in "z" directions.

File > Export > save as f3d on local drive > attach to next post

günther

[jeff_strater]

as you've discovered, either Sweep or Pipe will fail on this geometry, as they disallow self-intersecting geometry to be created.  TSpline pipe is a bit more forgiving there, but it may have issues of its own.  With the model, we can try it.

[Anonymous]

TSpline Pipe works great! The only problem i have now is to how to export it as STL, so i could print it.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff!

Do you know how to turn form into STL?

[jeff_strater]

@Anonymous - to save as STL, you will have to first convert the TSpline to a Brep body.  As you can see from the browser icon, this conversion has some errors:

If you click on this icon, it will attempt the conversion, which results in this error:

If you zoom into the model, the highlighted faces are self-intersecting.  There are several areas like this in the model.  I usually find that it is easier to see and deal with self-intersections if you convert to Box mode (in the Display Mode dialog):

If you do that, the self-intersections become apparent:

so, to fix this will require some work.  You will need to go into Form and remove the self intersections.

Finally, I notice that you have a LOT of sections in your pipe.  Maybe too many.  This will make untangling the self-intersections much harder.  Try using a lot fewer sections - the fewer the better.  Here is a much less dense version of part of this design that is still very smooth: