The Geometry Cleanup Wizard
This tutorial demonstrates the use of the Geometry Cleanup Wizard to defeature the geometry of a wheel rim imported from a Parasolid® file. The Geometry Cleanup is capable of automatically identifying and eliminating small geometric details, such as small faces, sliver faces, short edges, thin domains, and gaps in the geometry. One of the actions that the cleanup tool can use is the Remove Details operation, which utilizes virtual geometry operations that can set geometric entities, such as vertices, edges, or faces, to be ignored by the mesher. Since selected elements are “hidden” from the mesher, meshing takes place on a virtual geometry, hence the name virtual operations.
Virtual operations work on the finalized geometry, that is, the geometry after the Form Union or Form Assembly nodes. This means that using these operations you can remove small domains that result from intersecting solid objects. Another benefit is that they keep the curvature of the geometry, which may be important when removing larger faces, or for certain physics applications where altering the curvature of the geometry can, for example, give rise to stress concentrations.