Topic: Presspull/ing my hair out

[jnieman]

I wblock'd this beam out to see if anyone can replicate my situation or provide insight/guidance.

I can't use presspull on the end shown.

The object was created by extruding a closed polyline, but the closed polyline had the fillets included at the web/flange intersection, so I subtracted boxes from the whole solid to remove them.

I run into this semi-often, presspull not being able to detect a face, however, there clearly is a face.

I've tried zooming in, zooming out, regen'ing all over, 3dorbit'ing and trying again, and many other fiddle-tricks to try and convince it to do it's job, but it still doesn't see a face.  The visual style goes a bit funky with the line work... that's par for the course, for whatever reason (graphics card most likely) and when I render the view, it shows nothing... so maybe face normals are flipped for some reason, which would make a render treat the faces like a one-way mirror?

I'm not quite sure what's going on tbh.

It's a bit frustrating because one end of the beam CAN presspull out... the other not... so for now, I just move or rotated the beam, or use solidedit/f/m or whatever trick seems fastest atm.

[jnieman]

so odd.

I can use other tools reliant upon selecting a face, such as setting UCS to a face... selects it no problem.  I can use solidedit face tools on it... but presspull does not register the face.

[mjfarrell]

I wblock'd this beam out to see if anyone can replicate my situation or provide insight/guidance.

You wblock'd which beam out, as I can not seem to see it I will be unable to test anything with it.

First piece of guidance; post the block for us to play with.

[jnieman]

I wblock'd this beam out to see if anyone can replicate my situation or provide insight/guidance.

You wblock'd which beam out, as I can not seem to see it I will be unable to test anything with it.

First piece of guidance; post the block for us to play with.

hmph.  Musta messed something up when attaching the file.  It didn't show for me either just now, it's there now though.

[mjfarrell]

I think it falls outside these conditons for which push pull is permitted:

You can press or pull any of the following types of bounded areas:

Any area that can be hatched by picking a point (with zero gap tolerance)
Areas enclosed by crossing coplanar, linear geometry, including edges and geometry in blocks
Closed polylines, regions, 3D faces, and 2D solids that consist of coplanar vertices
Areas created by geometry (including edges on faces) drawn coplanar to any face of a 3D solid

I did a press pull on the 'top' of the beam as it came into the file and it worked fine.
I tried the 'bottom' and it failed.
I then did a 3drotate on the object and now any attmpts to PRESSPULL results in error
, attempted to use the PRESSPULL command by using CTRL+alt and clicking the 3drotated object and the command line responds:

Command:
0 loops extracted.


0 Regions created.

Command:
0 loops extracted.

This has to do with the original objects drawing planes I think.

Note, the end I did operate on did something 'odd' to the inside fillets on the flanges.

[jnieman]

Thanks for confirming the results.

The important info, now:

The object was created using Al's Steel Mill circa 1998.  I think I updated the .dat files with more recent steel shape libraries, but not sure.

Anyways, I couldn't replicate the problem at all modeling a mock W-beam manually, so all I can do as someone uneducated on the inner workings of the program, is assume that the program creates the solids in a manner that is simply not 100% friendly to the circumstances I want to use them for (not like he could foresee presspull or how they would program it to work, some 8 years before it would be created) so I guess now I have just 'that much' more motivation to roll my own steel shape program.

Thanks again.

[mjfarrell]

Only happy to help; it is interesting how much I learn by exploring this stuff for others.
Just today, I was able to use a tutorial I wrote for a user in the Land Lubber section, to assist in a class that I am teaching this week.