CompuServe Messages

Roger, Just read your comment (I got behind by over 2000 messages due to a triple-whammy of work and travel!) on the unsmoothable faces from AME. I've seen that problem several times on things I've made in AME or booleaned in 3DS. Usually, it was due to invisible faces with no width sandwiched between otherwise respectibly fat faces. In other words, the three vertices that made up an offending face were all on the same line, so the face was invisible. I could often find them only by zooming way in and scanning the offending line, perhaps selecting faces manually and looking for oddballs. Other times, the culprit has been a group of vertices, usually on the corners of an AME fillet, which looked OK at normal magnification but failed to get properly welded on import – probably due to some numerical precision burp in AME. At first, I fixed them manually. Later I got smarter and selected the whole mess, cranked the weld threshold way up (.01 or .1), and welded/selected. Once I spent 4 hours repairing an object which even Scotty couldn't have beamed up intact. JKJ