Variable Radius Fillets
There are many occasions when the Designer will require you to build variable radius fillets
This detail is a Halogen lamp housing which is blended into a complex curved surf, that moulds around the
corner of the yacht. The Stylist requires it to have a large blend of 100.0 on the outside, but a much smaller 20.0 mm blend on the inside
Start by making a complex curved back plate
Front: make 2 crvs that represent the outer wall and 2 circles that represent the wall of the lamp
Now project them onto the back plate and hide the original curves
Draft /Flange Surf Option
Select all the COS , then set depth and pull direction. I am pulling on the Y axis
Once you have created the draft surfs.
put a skin surf across them to close them off and then
using the Round tool, select all the edges and fillet them all in one go
You should have a basic back plate assy that looks like this (above)
Trim away the flash
and put the outer wall on a new layer. Make it inactive
Set the Surface Fillet Control as shown above
(I have used a default tangent offset value of 20 but you may probably need the std.default setting which is 10.0000)
- select the back plate it will turn pink, then hit accept
- select the outer wall it will turn yellow then hit accept
- now you will see a yellow and a pink arrow. these indicated which side of your target surfs the fillet will build, if they are not pointing the right way, just click on the incorrect arrow to flip its direction
- now hit “build”
now you will see that a uniform radius fillet has built
- click on the right hand side of the blue indicator line
- a radius indicator will appear. In the prompt line, type in a high value , mine was 100. you may onlyneed say 25 to 50
- click on the leftt hand side of the blue indicator line
- a radius indicator will appear. In the prompt line, type in a low value , mine was 20. you may need less
- hit Recalculate and the final variable fillet will build
Curvature Evaluation
set to “mean” and value 10.0 we can see the superb quality of surfaces available from the Surf Fillet Control
Zebra Stripe Diagnostic
tessellator turned up full, plot set wide and Shader Anti-Alias set to medium, everything looks fine
the Stylist is right again the variable radius fillet looks beautiful
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