Intersecting Volumes

The material resulting from an intersection operation between two volumes is the material shared by these volumes. This tasks illustrates how to compute two intersections.
Open the IntersectVolume1.CATPart document.
  This is your initial data: the Intersect part is composed of three geometrical sets.
 

  1. Click Intersect from the Volumes operations sub-toolbar.

    The Intersect dialog box opens and to lets you determine the second volume you wish to use.
  2. Select the volume to intersect (CloseSurface.3).

  3. Select the volume to be intersected with (CloseSurface.1).

  4. Select a destination body after which the intersected volume will be located.

    If the Geometrical Set or the Ordered Geometrical Set is current, the After field is valuated with the current body and will be located after its last feature.
  5. Click Preview to visualize the intersection.

  6. Click OK.

    The operation (identified as Intersect.xxx) is added to the specification tree.
    The specification tree and the Intersect part now look like this:
    • You can edit an Intersect feature and modify the volume to be intersected with. To do so, simply double-click the feature in the specification tree and select a new volume in the Intersecting operand field.
    • You can also swap the input volumes: right-click the Base object field and select the Swap operands contextual item.
      This capability only works when both volumes belong to the same geometrical set or ordered geometrical set.
    • Adding a body to a solid body and vice versa is possible. In that case, the second body you select remains at the same location in the specification tree once the Boolean operation is done. To see an example, refer to Mixed Boolean Operations.
       
    • Multi-selection is not possible.
    • Avoid using input elements that are tangent to each other since this may result in geometric instabilities in the tangency zone.