Enveloping an irregular solid with a certain thickness
 

Hi. I'm new here.

I would like to ask help regarding this geometry that I initially prepared:

https://i.ibb.co/Npbkd4y/111.png

I wanted to make an enclosure for this geometry in SpaceClaim, but what I see from guides are simple box, cylinder, and sphere enclosures. What I wanted to happen is to make another solid that would enclose the entire thing that is about 5 millimeters thick at all sides.

That way, when I suppress the solid I have prepared I would have a hollow solid that is similar to this thing that I prepared that is 5mm thick. How can I achieve this?

Thank you!

Try the shell feature.

Another way to do this:

You could make another copy of the solid and scale it until it reaches the desired distance from the original body.
Detach all of the solids to turn it into surfaces and make two solid that has a gap in the middle for the original body, then combine those two bodies.

Hi! Thanks for replying.

I did try to use the shell feature, but an error keeps on popping up: "Cannot shell body, as it already contains an inner shell."

Could you point out what I did wrong here?

Hi! Thanks for replying.

I actually had this idea initially, then I started to think how can I make sure that the thickness of the resulting hollow solid would be 5mm.

Hello, just an update: I managed to make the shell part work. I think fiddling with it had me make a shell without knowing it.

Then now I have this issue that I cannot separate the prepared shell from the original body. Any ideas what should I do here?

Is it that you have only a surface body and not a solid? That maybe causes the error.

Actually I realized that while fiddling with the shell feature I managed to make a shell without realizing it.

My issue now is how to separate this shell generated from the solid. It just shows as a single solid in the structure pane (actually this is the reason why I didn't even realize that I already made the shell. There's nothing 'new' appearing in the structure pane).

EDIT: This is what I mean:

https://i.ibb.co/M8fYj6K/222.png

I managed to see that there is a shell by deleting one of the shell's faces. My problem is I cannot separate this generated shell from the solid formed.

So, in your feature tree I can see a solid and a surface body.
But you only did get the surface body due to deleting of one face, correct?
If you would have not deleted that face, you only had one solid?

Yeah. That is correct. Anyway, I managed to do it! This is so much fun :D Apparently if I have a surface of a body and used the shell function it converts that surface into a shell, going inward (so if I want a 5mm thick hollow object, I have to prepare 5mm in advance when preparing the solid). I learned something new. Thank you!

Great to hear! Yes, I tried it out yesterday and also saw that it goes inwards. I tried to enter a negative number but it didn't work haha [emoji23][emoji28]