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Engineering Tools — Surface from shell elements (00233)
What this tool does
Reconstructs a NURBS or planar surface from a selected set of
shell elements. Useful when the original geometry was lost or when
working with imported mesh-only models that need geometry support for
operations like extrusion, surface-trimming, or pressure-load
application.
When you want it
- Inherited mesh-only model. A vendor delivered a
.bdf with mesh but no STEP or PARASOLID geometry. You need surfaces
for further design work.
- Geometry corruption recovery. The original
.modfem was lost or its geometry was deleted. You have the mesh
intact and want to reconstruct the surface for tool operations.
- Coarse-to-fine refinement. You want to remesh
a region with finer elements but the geometry doesn't exist; build
it from the existing mesh first.
How to use it
- Open from Custom Tools > Geometry > Surface from
shell elements.
- Pick the shell elements to fit (typically a group or a property
selection).
- Choose surface type: planar (fastest, for flat patches), NURBS
(general but requires a topologically clean patch), or auto-detect
(default).
- Click OK. The new surface is added to the model. Mesh is
unchanged.
Surface fitting tolerances
The tool uses FEMAP's built-in surface-fitting kernel; tolerances
default to 1e-5 (relative). For low-quality input meshes the fit
may not converge — in that case try planar mode first, or
clean the input mesh of obvious bad elements before retrying.
Failure modes
- Non-manifold input. If the element selection
includes T-junctions or branches, the fit will fail. Pre-clean.
- Highly curved input on planar mode. Switches to
NURBS automatically with a warning.
- Empty selection. Tool exits with a warning, no
surface created.
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