About Creating Fillets

A fillet is a curved face of a constant or variable radius that is tangent to, and that joins, two surfaces. This topic provides an overview of how to create fillets.

Related Topics
Creating Edge Fillets
Creating Variable Radius Fillets
Creating Face-Face Fillets
Creating Tritangent Fillets

What is a Fillet Feature

A fillet is a curved face of a constant or variable radius that is tangent to, and that joins, two surfaces. Together, these three surfaces form either an inside corner or an outside corner.

In drafting terminology, the curved surface of an outside corner is generally called a 'round' and that of an inside corner is normally referred to as a 'fillet'.

Edge fillets are smooth transitional surfaces between two adjacent faces.

Reshaping Corners

Sometimes, while filleting the corners resulting from the operation are not satisfactory. The Blend Corners option available from Edge Fillet and Variable Radius Fillet dialog boxes lets you quickly reshape these corners . For more information, see Reshaping Corners.

Interrupting Fillet Computations

In case you made a mistake when defining a fillet (wrong radius value for example), you can interrupt the feature computation launched after clicking OK. This is possible when the computation requires a few seconds to perform.

In concrete terms, if the computation exceeds a certain amount of time, a window appears providing a Cancel option. To interrupt the operation, just click that Cancel button. This interrupts the process and then displays an Update Diagnosis dialog box enabling you to edit, deactivate, isolate or even delete the feature.

This capability is available for any types of fillet features you are creating or editing.

Deactivate and Extract Geometry Commands

If you perform a difficult fillet operation, for example resulting in twisted faces, you can use the Deactivate and Extract Geometry commands to solve your difficulties.

Extract lets you generate separate elements from the initial geometry, without deleting the geometry.

When the application then informs you via an error message window that the operation cannot be properly performed, closing the window displays a new dialog box providing you with a solution: you can deactivate the feature and extract its geometry.

After clicking Yes to confirm these operations, the feature appears as deactivated in the specification tree. A node Extracted Geometry (Fillet.1) is displayed in the tree too.