Weld Vertices Feature

The Weld Vertices feature helps to repair and simplify meshes by merging multiple vertices together.

Use

This feature can be used to…

  • Repair a hole in a mesh built from in imported geometry.

  • Simplify a mesh that has too many vertices.

 

Weld Vertices Feature Properties

Property Options

Name

Name the feature. Unique names for each feature is not required, but useful in managing a longer feature stack.

Edit Vertices

Opens the Vertex Selection Pane to define the collection of vertices to be merged.

Editing Vertices

Creating the feature, or returning to the feature and clicking the Edit Vertices button, starts a special scene mode where you can select specific vertices of the active mesh. While in this mode...

Viewing your results

Tips

  • A new toolbar appears across the top of the scene as a reminder. You will stay in this mode until you click the Done button in that bar.

  • All the vertices of the selected mesh appear as small dots. Blue dots are not selected, yellow dots are selected and will be welded together.

  • Other scene operations (like rotating the mesh or renaming the mesh) are not available until you exit this mode by clicking Done.

  • Orbit about the selected mesh with a mouse drag.

  • Select vertices with Shift-Drag. The selected vertices will highlight yellow.

  • Add more vertices to your selection with Shift-Control-Drag.

  • Deselect vertices from your selection with Shift-Alt-Drag. They will return to a blue color.

  • Save your collection of vertices by clicking Done. The toolbar disappears, and vertex selection mode ends.

  • Edit a collection of vertices by clicking the Edit Vertices button again to return to this mode.

Technical Notes

The selected vertices are not welded together until the feature is closed. You can close a feature by clicking the chevron in the header of the feature, or by opening another feature. In this way, you can easily see “before and after” the weld by opening and closing the weld feature in the stack.

Various rendering modes (such as wireframe mode) can help you understand the mesh better and select the vertices more accurately. Learn more about rendering modes shown in the scene toolbar.

Weld Vertices is destructive feature, and can adversely affect any subsequent features on this mesh. In most cases, this feature is not adjusted during run-time with Snap rules, or even collapsed permanently. For a technical description of destructive features, see the technical notes on the “Delete Faces” documentation.

 

When multiple vertices are selected for welding, the resulting single vertex is placed at the barycenter of the source vertices. A barycenter can be thought of as the average of those points.

For example, when welding three of the 4 vertices across the top of this cube, you’ll see that the resulting welded vertex is the average position of the 3 source vertices. It’s just as high along the green Y axis as the original points, as they all had that same height. But its position along the red and blue X and Z axes is the average of the other 3 points.

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