cleanup

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Modeling - Editing

Cleanup

Remove the needles, spikes, and slivers that offsets and boolean clips leave along a boundary.

When you build a dense pattern by offsetting a motif and then clipping it to a border, the boundary can pick up tiny defects - hair-thin whiskers, needle-like spikes, and slivers of near-zero area. Cleanup scrubs them away so the shape fills solidly and exports cleanly.

Where these artifacts come from

They aren't in your original drawing - they're born where operations meet at awkward angles.

• A round Offset followed by a near-tangent boolean clip is the classic case: at each band tip the offset edge runs a little past the corner and a short stub doubles back along it. That's an overshoot needle.
• A join where two edges almost meet but not quite leaves a whisker: a vertex poking a hair's width off the line it should sit on.
• A clip that shaves a shape down to a splinter leaves a sliver: a contour with real outline but almost no area.

Left in place these cause visible barbs, and worse, they can leave a boundary that isn't quite closed - which makes a fill drop the shape entirely instead of filling it. In the output that shows up as scales or bands that simply don't fill, so it's worth clearing before you export.

What Cleanup does

Cleanup runs a series of passes over each closed contour. You can toggle each one independently and tune its sensitivity.

• Weld Points snaps join vertices that sit within your tolerance onto a single shared point, dropping any edge that collapses to nothing. Arc endpoints are re-fit around their own center and radius, so an arc stays a true arc.
• Remove Spikes finds a join where the two edges reverse direction: a real corner never doubles back on itself. A short whisker becomes a straight bridge; an overshoot needle is reseated onto one shared corner and the stub is dropped, squaring the corner off.
• Min Area drops any closed contour whose true area (measured with its arcs accounted for, not just its corners) falls below the threshold you set: this is what clears out slivers without touching legitimate thin bands.
• Blunt Tips chamfers a genuinely sharp cusp to a flat cap. It's off by default and rarely needed: leave it off unless you specifically want sharp points capped.
• A final pass seals any residual gap with a micro-segment, so every contour comes out watertight: which is what lets it fill solidly under any fill rule, not just simple ones.

The passes run in that order, so a weld tidies the joins before spike removal reseats corners and Min Area clears what's left.

Tip

Start with the defaults - Weld Points, Remove Spikes, and Min Area on, Blunt Tips off. That combination handles the offset-then-clip case. Reach for the tolerance and area values only if a specific defect survives or a legitimate detail gets eaten.

Caution

Confirm against the build Min Area removes whole tiny contours by area - set it too high and you can drop small pattern elements you meant to keep. Nudge it up gradually and watch what disappears.

A related command: Merge Coincident Points

Separate from artifact cleanup, there's a Clean Up: Merge Coincident Points command that consolidates points sitting on top of each other into one, repointing everything that referenced them. It skips any merge that would break a shape (collapsing a segment to zero length, or fusing a circle's center into the circle), so it's safe to run on a construction that's accumulated stray duplicate points.

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