multiple faces copy?
 

Hi friends;

I have a 1 ft. long flexible duct geometry which consists of 16 seperate half turn faces. What I need to do is simply duplicate it in Z direction to have a 100 ft. long duct.

However, the model gets too loaded when I duplicate 16 faces 100 times.

What is a better way to do this?

I tried merging faces but it says some edges are not connected although they perfectly are.

Thanks a lot, and good luck with your own work.

ahmet

Re: multiple faces copy?
 

I'm guessing that when you say "the model gets too loaded" you're more talking about the fact that it looks cluttered and hard to work with. You may have to just deal with it though.

There's a difference between connected and coincident... if you have a face that's 1ft long, and you copy that face and translate it 1ft then the edges are coincident, but they are not connected (coincident means there are two edges sharing the same space, connected means there is one edge being shared by both faces... it's like the difference of having 2 sheets of paper next to each other, and a double-wide sheet of paper with a fold in the middle). If you're using the copy command, you will have to manually connect each set of edges that are coincident (if your geometry is real you can connect them all at once by selecting all of the edges in the edge connect window, otherwise you have to virtually connect each pair of edges, one pair at a time...).

Another option that would avoid connecting edges and stuff would be to create a 1ft long volume that's the right shape, and duplicate that every 1ft... then unite all of the volumes to create one single volume. Now you can go back and merge the faces if you want. I'd be careful though... if you're trying to capture the "humps" of the flexible tubing then you have to be careful your mesh is refined enough to capture the geometry. If you merge all of the faces, it's easy to lose a sense of proportion and you may "smooth" out the humps. Just something to watch out for.

Hope this helps, and good luck, Jason