Filling space in plaster cast fashion

Hi all!

is there a way to fill the space below the solid body as if you would press it into plaster and remove it again?

Or in other words: if rain would fall from z-direction, is there a way to fill up the space, that would stay dry from rain?

(I've messed around for hours now with sculpt, loft and 3D sketches, but I don't get the clue)

Thanks a lot!

Fill.ipt

I'm not sure I 100% follow you, but maybe mess around with the Intersect operation. Check it out on you tube.

Quality Check indicates problems with the imported model.

I assume that something like this is what you are after (wasn't sure which side).

@ JD Mather

that was quick! And precisely to the spot.

It is exactly what I want. How did you do it?

(I can see that you introduced a surface and used the sculpt command - I wanted to do the same and failed).

Did you want just the volume under the part or did you also want the part connected to the volume (as I have shown, I suspect you are making tooling and only want the missing volume as a separate solid).

I use it for further simulations in a different tool (electromagnetics) and just need solid rock material down to the floor.

Even if it is not so important for my next steps whether the part is connected to the volume or not, I am definitely interested in learning about both options. Especially as I am unable to find even one way myself.

JD,

you would help me a lot if you could just post your solution, so that I can analyze your way of doing it.

I do appreciate your efforts very much.

I am using 2014, so you would not be able to open my file.

I am going to skip over the steps to fix the face that did not pass quality check (this may or may not cause problems in getting to my solution - we'll see.)

Start a new sketch on the workplane you created.

Project Geometry the outside boundary edges (be careful to get them all - there is one very small edge).

Extrude (at this point you should be able to extrude as a solid To Next, but that doesn't work.

In the Extrude dialog box set the Output to Surface.

Extrude the surface through all.

Select Sculpt and select the solid body, the extruded surface and the workplane.

Attach this attempt here if you can't get it to work.

Unfortunately, I had to fix the loop that did not pass the quality check.

Whenever I tried the Extrusion command, a closed loop was not recognized and I couldn't go on.

I deleted some of the projected lines and drew new ones (more or less by trial and error), until the sketch doctor was satisfied and the extrusion command worked.

Here is a picture of just two (blue colour) of at least four lines I had to exchange against new ones.

@ JD: thanks indeed for tackling this quite complicated problem. It seems, that dealing with imported geometry is not so easy ...

But now I know two possible approaches: one by extrusion command alone and one by combination with sculpt command.

...

Whenever I tried the Extrusion command, a closed loop was not recognized and I couldn't go on.

....

To go on, simply change the Output to Surface instead of solid.

I wrote a paper here on using Neutral Format files.

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/content/DSG322/inventor_surface_tutorials.htm

Look for one of the AU presentations (probably the last one).

Changing the output to "surface" instead of solid took me on one step. I could see the extension arrow and I could build the surface ("to all" did not work, but I could manually pull the arrow):

Now I have a fully enclosed volume between part, work plane and extruded surface and still cannot sculpt:

I looked into the suggested literature (thumbs up: quite elaborate) but couldn't get it in line with my Inventor 2013 behaviour, as now Inventor uses the repair environment instead of the construction environment. In the repair environment, the heal command couldn't find any irregularities.

I see that the surface and the workplane is selected, but did you also select the solid?

Can you attach the file here.

r2013 can be set to revert to the old Construction Environment in Tools>Application Options.

For some reason they left some functionality out of the Repair Environment in 2013, I have not had a chance to check 2014 yet.

I cannot select the solid (or at least, I don't know how).

Here is the file:

(it is vers. 2014, yesterday I have updated. On a second machine I have still vers. 2013, just in case...)

sculpt_problem.ipt

There is something wrong that I can't find in a quick inspection, I'll have to take a closer look when I get a chance. Since you now have 2014 I can post the solution when I figure out what I did the first time (I erased the file.)