Power Tools GUI Tutorial Step 8

Step 8: Tweaking Surfaces

Tweaking is the process of deleting, moving, or offsetting, surfaces and extending or trimming adjacent surfaces to fill in the gaps. Tweaking is useful for eliminating gaps between components, simplifying geometry or changing the dimensions of an entity. Tweaking will be used in this example to decrease the radius of the upper cylinder.

Begin by reanalyzing the geometry.

• Press Analyze on the Power Tools menu

There should be 1 entry under the "Close Loops" category for Surface 38. A close loop (pronounced KLOS) is a surface which has two loops that are within some small distance of each other at their closest points. The parameter for distance is the square of the shortest edge length parameter.

• Press the Tweak Button (since you are not tweaking Surface 41 directly, the surface does not need to be highlighted when you press the tweak button)

The Geometry-Surface-Modify-Tweak will open on the Control Panel as shown below.

• Enter Surface 16 by typing it in at the input line or selecting from the graphics window
• Select the Offset option from the pull-down menu

Surface 16 is shown highlighted below.

• Enter an Offset Value of -0.9.

The offset value is a percentage of the current size. Entering -0.9 will decrease the radius by 10 percent.

• Press Apply

The graphics window should now look like this. Notice that the radius of the cylinder has shrunk inward, increasing the gap between the edges on Surface 41.