Learning Forum

[Sterling Butters]

Some potentially unecessary background:

I have a situation in which I want to extrude the portion of a number of solid bodies that is not "shadowed" by another part (based on some arbitrary perspective). E.g. if I had a rectangular prism under an annular cylinder such that the axis of the cylinder was perpendicular to the top prism face (and the cylinder was offset some nominal distance from the top prism face) - I would like to extrude the top face of the annular cylinder and the inverse of that profile projected onto the prism. I can almost reasonably achieve this by "Modify > Project to Sketch" all the curves of these two objects onto a plane above the annular cylinder and then "Intersect > Project" the curves onto both solids. At this point I can use the pull command on the appropriate faces (based on my selection).

Main Issue:

The problem is that when I use the pull command to extrude these faces, it extends the existing solid bodies. The advantage of this for me is the ability to pull a number of faces that might not be planarly coincident. Is there a way to extrude the faces of these bodies but create new solid bodies from the extrusion? The alternative would be to go back and split the extended bodies but that is much less than ideal. 

[peteroznewman]

In SpaceClaim, you can create a surface body from any face of a solid by selecting one or more faces and clicking Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V (copy, paste). Now if you hide the solid, you can Pull these surface bodies into solids that are independent of the original solid. You can later use the Combine tool to add these new solids to the original solid.