How can I cap this geo?

[dpap]

I have the geo that you see in the first pic and I can't find a way to cap the highlighted edges.

The approaches I tried:

 

1) Polycap using only the boundary edges doesn't work. 

 

2) dissolve all edges except from the boundaries and go from there, but dissolve went crazy. Why is dissolve giving me this result (pic.2)?

 

3) 2Dtriangulate the points of the boundaries and cleanup by creating and deleting an edge group based on edge length. Doesn't work cause the wide range of lengths won't let me filter out the ones I don't need.

 

4) Fuse the result of the triangulation with the rest of the mesh and use Divide with Remove Shared Edges turn on. Nope....

 

5) Last picture. I just manually blasted the unwanted primitives so that I can illustrate the final result I am going after

 

Is there way to cap geo like this procedurally?

 

Thanks!

 

polycap.hip

[tjeeds]

If you turn off triangulation on the PolyCap you can use the Hole node which detects coplanar faces, then a Divide sop with Avoid Small Angles toggled on will give you decent triangles.

polycap.hipnc

[Atom]

Here is a similar approach but with an animated clip. Play the animation to see the object appear. The gap width is controlled by the Z-AXIS translation value of the PolyExtrude.

 

This is basically a mix of dpapd's file and Marty's solution to a cleaner inner extrusion.

ap_ClippedSphere.hipnc

Edited January 18, 2016 by Atom

[dpap]

I didn't know about the Hole node. It's super cool!

 

Thank you very much guys!