Suggested Technique for Creating a Surface Merge in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0

It is often necessary to merge two or more adjacent or intersecting surface quilts together. This will create a separate merge feature that combines the individual surfaces into one continuous quilt.

This technique depicts a Merge as Intersect operation. The Merge as Join operation is similar, except that the surfaces are not trimmed away. The Join option should be used when two surfaces have adjoining one-sided edges.

• In the example depicted in Figure 1, two surfaces are intersecting each other completely and are ready to be merged
• While pressing CTRL, select both surfaces, then click Edit > Merge
• The dashboard will appear as in Figure 2
• Ensure that the dashboard is configured to merge two quilts that intersect. Notice also the buttons that control the side of the trimmed surfaces that are to be kept.
• Pro/ENGINEER will display preview geometry of the resulting surface, as in Figure 3 (use the wireframe display mode)
• At this point, click on the yellow arrows to toggle which sections are to be kept
• Pro/ENGINEER will update the preview geometry as these options are toggled
• See Figure 4 and Figure 5 for different resulting surfaces
• Apply and save the changes to the feature and close the dashboard
• Figure 6 shows the completed feature

It is important to note that every merging of two quilts produces a new quilt feature. The parental hierarchy of quilts determines how the quilts are affected by such commands as Edit Definition and Delete.

For all merge operations, the additional quilt is merged in the parent quilts. When complete, the merged quilt consists of three portions: two surfaces that provide the geometry, and a merge feature that contains the information for the surface intersection or joining. The original surfaces are thus parents of the merge feature.