The edge zipper can be used to join mismatched surfaces together to form one continuous surface. It does this by re-triangulating the faces at the edges and adding new vertices so that a one to one connection is obtained.
Before the edge zipper can be used, feature curves have to be defined along both sets of edges to be joined together. The easiest way of doing this is by using the Mark Free Edges option when computing feature curves, although they can be added manually if preferred. The feature curves to be used for the zipping process can belong to the same node or to different nodes, but have to belong to the same region. Extra feature curves not belonging to the free edges can also be included but they will have no effect on the zipping process.
An example geometry with mismatched surfaces and the appropriate feature curve set is shown below:
To run the edge zipper, select the feature curve node name or names (using multiple selection) and right-click. In the pop-up menu select the Zip Edges option:
The Edge Zipping Options dialog will appear:
Two tolerance values can be set depending on the proximity of the mismatched surfaces to one another:
Press the OK button to perform the edge zipping operation. If new faces need to be created in order to zip the two surfaces then they will be added to the appropriate boundary node in the surface. Feature curves may also be deleted depending on the zipping triangulation. An example of a zipped surface is shown here.
The output from a successful edge zipping operation will look like this:
The use of the edge zipper usually results in poor quality triangles being produced along the length of the surface mismatch. For this reason, it is recommend that you apply the surface remesher to the closed surface in order to improve the triangulation quality prior to generating a volume mesh.