Healing Geometry

This task shows how to heal surfaces, that is how to fill any gap that may be appearing between two surfaces.
This command can be used after having checked the connections between elements for example, or to fill slight gaps between joined surfaces.
Open the Healing1.CATPart document.
Display the Join-Healing toolbar by clicking and holding the arrow from the Join  icon.

  1. Click the Healing icon.

The Healing Definition dialog box appears.

  1. Select the surfaces to be healed.

  1. You can edit the list of elements in the definition list:
by selecting elements in the geometry:
Standard selection (no button clicked):
when you click an unlisted element, it is added to the list 
when you click a listed element, it is removed from the list
Add Mode: 
when you click an unlisted element, it is added to the list 
when you click a listed element, it remains in the list
Remove Mode: 
when you click an unlisted element, the list is unchanged 
when you click a listed element, it removed from the list
by selecting an element in the list then using the Remove\Replace contextual menu items.
If you double-click the Add Mode or Remove Mode button, the chosen mode is permanent, i.e. successively selecting elements will add/remove them.  However, if you click only once, only the next selected element is added or removed.
You only have to click the button again, or click another one, to deactivate the mode.

  1. From the Parameters tab, define the distance below which elements are to be healed, that is deformed so that there is no more gap, using the Merging distance as described in Joining Geometry.
    Elements between which the gap is larger than the indicated value are not processed.

In our example, we increase it to 1mm.

You can also set the Distance objective, i.e. the maximum gap allowed between two healed elements. By default it is set to 0.001 mm, and can be increased to 0.1 mm.

  1. Click OK to create the healed surfaces.

The surface (identified as Heal.xxx) is added to the specification tree.

Check the Surfaces' boundaries option from the Tools -> Options menu item, General -> Display -> Visualization tab to display the boundaries. This may be especially useful when selecting, and also to identify gaps.
Provided the Tangent mode is active, you can retain sharp edges, by clicking the Sharpness tab, and selecting one or more edges.
You can edit the list of edges as described above for the list of elements to be healed.
The Sharpness angle allows to redefine the limit between a sharp angle and a flat angle. This can be useful when offsetting the resulting healed geometry for example.  By default this angle value is set to 0.5 degree.
In some cases,  depending on the geometry configuration and the set parameters, the Multi-Result Management dialog box is displayed. 
Click No or refer to Creating the Nearest Entity of a Multiple Element.

When the healing failed, the update error dialog box appears.
Click OK to improve the geometry.


The erroneous elements are displayed on the geometry.
The Visualization tab enables you to better understand the discontinuities in the model and the results of the healing action.

 It lets you define the way the messages are displayed on the smoothed element.
 

You can choose to see:

All the messages, that is to say the messages indicating where the discontinuity remains as well as those indicating where the discontinuity type has changed (in point (><) and tangency (^))

only the messages indicating where the discontinuity is Not corrected and still remains

 

None of the messages

 
 

You can also choose to see:

Display information interactively: only the pointers in the geometry are displayed, above which the text appears when passing the pointer 
Display information sequentially: only one pointer and text are displayed in the geometry, and you can sequentially move from one pointer to another using the backward/forward buttons

 
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