Create fixed width blends

00:00

So, this sharp edge between my two sets of surfaces is what we call the theoretical intersection,

00:07

and the surface fillet construction will respond to the angle between those two sets of surfaces.

00:14

So, if we just take a look at these patches here,

00:17

you can see that big change between the relative angle as it goes along,

00:22

and you can see that as the edge fades out towards the wheel arch.

00:27

So, if I now do a default radius fillet on here, I can just drag all those surfaces and build it.

00:35

You can see that the contact lines vary quite a lot to maintain that constant profile shape.

00:44

And if I have a quick look with the Diagnostic Shade, you can see the constancy of that circular profile.

00:53

And this is where we often choose one of these three widths definitions instead.

00:59

So, I'll just take the first one and build that.

01:02

And you can see that this is completely different; this now maintains a constant width between these contact lines,

01:09

and it achieves that by modifying the radius value as it goes along.

01:13

So, it's flattening out towards the outside edge there.

01:16

So, these three work in a similar fashion, and they've just got different underlying mathematics.

01:21

So, you can just take an experimentalist approach and just try them out and see if there's any difference.

01:26

So that gives us a slightly more even one.

01:28

Theoretical is often the most successful, but it's worth exploring which ones give you the best results.

01:36

And we can use that up at the top on our fillet here,

01:42

which if we have a closer look, you can see it's getting wider and narrower across those input surfaces.

01:49

So, if we do a Query At it on this one and see what a Width Definition does for us,

01:56

that gives us a much more consistent-looking fillet.

02:01

And if we have a look at the radius, there's nothing unpleasant happening there.

02:07

So finally, I just want to show you the two different chordal types that we can use, the chordal length or the tangent length.

02:15

And I've got one of each here, and I'll just switch to orthographic view so that we can compare them.

02:20

And here, we have the chordal, which takes our specified value of 80 and it measures it directly between the two contact lines.

02:27

Whereas the tangent length measures from the contact line out to the theoretical intersection.

02:36

So just experiment with those two options.