Discover the process of combining all the bodies that make up a slide feature and learn how to troubleshoot common issues, such as rebuild errors. This article takes you through the steps, from using the Combine tool to running fillets on all sharp edges.
Key Insights:
- The Combine tool is used to merge different pieces into a single body. To avoid rebuild errors, all bodies to be combined must intersect each other sufficiently and not create infinitesimally small spaces.
- Rebuild errors often occur when there is a minute separation between bodies. This can be resolved by ensuring that the bodies intersect, as depicted with the adjustment of the offset of the rings in the slide.
- After successfully combining all bodies into a single one, fillets can be run on all sharp edges at the same time. This is efficient and reduces the need for several fillet features from body to body.
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In this video, we're going to combine all the bodies that make our slide and finish out our slide feature. All right, now, if we go to the Features tab, here you should have a tool called Combine. If you don't have that, simply go to the search commands, type Combine, click it, and drag it into this space.
Let's go to Combine. For this, I wanna make sure that Add is checked because we're going to be adding these pieces together in a single body. Now we just need to select which bodies we want to combine.
Well, let's grab the feet and the legs. Let's grab the slide itself and each of these rings, and then finally this platform here. All right, once we have all of these selected, let's click the screen check mark.
All right, now, you may be running into this issue right here called a rebuild error. It's unable to create a single body that is the sum of the input bodies. In other words, we're trying to combine a body or another, or several bodies that don't actually touch each other or create infinitesimally small spaces, and I'll show you where that's likely happening.
Let's go ahead and close this out. I'm gonna go ahead and just do a section view so we can cut through this slide. All right.
Now, we have this ring sitting on top of this portion of the slide, but if we zoom in closely, there's the tiniest separation occurring between the slide and the ring, and that's creating problems for our combined feature. Anytime we want to combine bodies, they need to intersect each other sufficiently enough to not create super tiny problematic moments, and that's because our rings simply aren't thick enough. This one inch offset isn't enough.
It needs to offset a little bit in the other direction as well. All right, so let's fix that so our combined feature will work. All right, so I'm gonna go back to this feature, which we have shown here, go into the sketch, and of course, as you remember earlier, we just grabbed the outside of that edge.
Well, let's make that construction, and let's do an offset entities of that same edge, make sure it's offsetting into the slide because we want these bodies to intersect each other, and one inch is plenty of meat for these guys to intersect with, so let's set that to one inch and close it out. All right. Now, what it's done is it's also affected each of the instances in our curve-driven pattern, so you can see by the lack of a black line here that our rings intersect our slide sufficiently.
Those tiny moments will no longer occur. All right, let's try the combine command one more time. We'll grab these legs and the feet, grab the slide, the rings, and the platform.
Close it out. There we go. It worked.
Now that we have all these into a single body, we can run fillets on all the sharp edges at the exact same time without doing several fillet features from body to body to body, so let's go ahead and do that now. All right, and let's soften that edge, soften this edge, soften this edge, these two edges here, cover this top edge here, this top edge here, and this is a plastic piece, so there's probably gonna be some sort of fillet aspect here as well, and we'll soften the bottom of these feet. Actually, let's leave those alone.
I'm gonna uncheck those. I'm gonna give those a different fillet. Close it out.
Let's go ahead and fill the bottom of the feet. We can just select the surface if we want, and we'll set this to half an inch. Close that out.
All right, the last thing I wanna fillet is this platform right here, but I think I'm going to save that for when we start editing this part after we extract it from this master model, so for right now, let's go ahead and just save our work, and since we have a new slide, let's color it green. Right-click, Edit Appearance, highlight this entire slide body, and close it out with a green check mark. Save our work one more time.
Now's a good chance for us to review the number of bodies. We have a 176. Please take a moment to review the green bodies of the model.
We're getting closer to the point where we are going to be extracting the green bodies out of our master model, and we wanna make sure we get all the right ones. Okay, cool. Save your work, and that does that.
In the next video, we're going to create some metal brackets for attaching some of our beams together. Thank you.
