About the Repair Tool
The Repair tool is used to automatically repair unsatisfied topological connections and tangency conditions of the imported data. The Repair tool uses the active Wireframe and any of its associated tangency constraints or its parent surfaces as input.
Repair and Match are available only when an active surface set or an active component exists in the imported model. For Repair and Match, you can select wireframes or surfaces from the active component or the component in which active surfaces exist.
This tool is available in the following instances:
• The Geometry and topology Structure (GTS) Tree consists of a single component node.
• The GTS Tree consists of multiple component nodes and one of them is explicitly selected and activated.
• A subset of surfaces of a component node is explicitly activated.
• A subset of surfaces of an active component or a component with an active subset is in the selection buffer.
• Wireframes exist in the selection buffer.
When you select wireframes and access the Repair tool, the surfaces associated with the selected wireframes are automatically selected and sent to the Repair tool. You can select wireframes, such as green wireframes with unsatisfied tangency constraints, to repair tangency.
Import DataDoctor also provides the option to select the surfaces associated with the wireframes. Select wireframes, especially wireframes with unsatisfied topological connections and tangency conditions that appear black in color, right-click, and access Select parent surfaces to select the parent surfaces of the wireframes. You can then activate the parent surfaces before you use them for repair.
The Repair tool uses wireframes and their associated surfaces, an active component node, or a set of surfaces of a component as input. After you define the wireframe and the associated tangency as required, you can use the Repair tool. The Repair tool attempts to satisfy all unsatisfied topological connections and tangency conditions by changing the surfaces or their boundaries. You can explicitly select the Repair Tangency check box in the Repair tool to fix the unsatisfied tangency conditions of the wireframes. If you set the idd_repair_tangency configuration option to yes, Repair Tangency is selected by default.
Using the Repair tool may potentially result in changes that are not required. To avoid this, freeze the surfaces. Freezing a surface means that the repair tool can modify the surface’s boundaries but not its mathematical definition to repair the data. Any surface that is not frozen may be changed in an unlimited way by the Repair tool. For example, if an analytical plane surface is not frozen, the Repair tool may re-parameterize it into a spline surface and change its geometry so that it is no longer planar. If you want to prevent certain surfaces from being re-parameterized by Repair, you must freeze them before using the Repair tool. Analytical surfaces are frozen by default.
If you want to prevent the boundaries of certain surfaces from being modified, that is prevent both surface definition and boundary modification, you must specifically activate only the surfaces of the component that you want to allow Repair to change. The Repair tool cannot change any surface that is not part of the active surface set.
The Repair tool may fail to repair the topological connections and tangency automatically if too many restrictions are made on the changes that it is allowed to make to the associated surfaces. For cases such as these, either the restrictions must be reduced by activating more surfaces or by removing frozen constraints, or you must use the manual repair methods.