What to do?

[ednachman]

I am attempting to drill. Most of the radial arms have been drilled but on one occasion I got the following message,
"Unable to regenerate contour.
This may be caused by highly non-planar polygons,
Or by ambiguous overlap between polygon edges and the cutting tool.
Triple non-planar polygons or add a small offset to data and try again."

I am attaching an image showing the attempted drill with the message and another with the entire object.

I'm not sure what the message means. Any help is appreciated.

[meatycheesyboy]

I usually see this error when trying to boolean subtract objects. The fix is usually to nudge either your cut object or your base objects a mm or 2 in any direction.

In this case though, I don't think that's necessary. If I am understanding the picture correctly, I think you could probably just grab the cap polygons, bevel them (inset only, no shift), delete the inset polygons then manually bridge the resulting pieces.

[edit] nevermind that last part, I stupidly didn't think about the intersection in the center. [edit]

[jeric_synergy]

Your cutter object has a lot of geometry--- try reducing that.

Is the interior intersection VISIBLE in the animation? If not, I'd do as mcb says above and just bevel the ends in.

[spherical]

I've gotten this a lot. Things to be aware of with Booleans:

• You cannot cut through a point. Points are... points. They have no dimension, therefore, they cannot be split in two. This is what is behind meatycheezyboy's advice to nudge.
• The error message can also be a result of cruft in the geometry. Be certain that both objects are sound. IOW, no holes, no coplanar polys, no overlapping polys, all polys correctly facing, etc.
• Sometimes the Speed Booleans will work, where the original won't.

[meshpig]

I agree with chuck, just bevel the ends. Drill is part of an oldish toolset i.e. LWCAD cuts into n-gons.

Attachment 123733

[jeric_synergy]

If the holes need to go all the way thru, making them BEFORE copying/rotating the bits around will be a lot easier.

Unless you're doing some fancy stuff with the exterior chamfer.

[Amurrell]

Also, you can force polygons into being planar by tripling your polys. Sometimes just tripling your cutting object is enough.

[OFF]

you can split your object into pieces and over each individually do your Boolean operations. it helps on the difficult, complex models.