Rule Fillet

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  Rule Fillet
  October 20, 2008, 12:06 PM Jay Tedeschi

  Well, as promised I will take a look at yet another unique area of functionality available to users of the Plastic Features Technology Preview. Today I will introduce you to the Rule Fillet.

  

  Rule Fillet… intriguing name isn’t it? For those of you who have backgrounds in surface modeling, this name may bring to mind something like this… S(t, u) = p(t) + ur(t), an algebraic description of a type of developable surface. However, in this case, Rule Fillet is exactly what it sounds like. Quite simply, it is a fillet which has as a characteristic a set of rules governing its behavior.

  Take a look at the image below… I have applied a Rule Fillet to a Rib feature. In the dialog box you can see that I have selected the entire feature as the source and have selected all of the edges of this feature as targets for the fillet.

  

  I do not however want the top or end faces of the rib feature to have filleted or rounded edges, so I must exclude them from the selection set. If I expand the dialog box to show additional settings, I have access to tools which will allow me to remove both individual faces and edges from the selection set.

  

  The advantage of setting up a fillet rule such as this is that if there are any geometric changes to the feature, e.g., rib elements being added or removed from the feature definition, the fillet will automatically be added or removed as well, without any additional interaction on the part of the designer whatsoever.

  

  A quick edit to the Rib feature, selecting an additional sketched line which was omitted previously updates the Rib network. Fortunately, because of the Rule Fillet, I do not have to restructure the part history, or edit the fillet to include additional edges as the new addition is included in the existing Rib feature and therefore is filleted automatically.

  

  A catchphrase in the software industry for years has been the ability to “capture design intelligence”. It could be argued that features such as Rule Fillet finally achieve this.

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