ESpy

Thank you - couldn't think of a better description of it. It won't show at the printed scale, but if it's visible on-screen then it's additional geometry that loads the file with unnecessary data. Decimate shows what I assume is the same dialogue box I get before exporting as STL; however, there's a key word there... Still fumbling with the retopo need though - as this is destined for STL output, what's the need/benefit in this case?

Bearing in mind I'm still fairly new to 3D Coat (beyond simple smoothing use) - The boolean operations were done here because they failed in Rhino. Not unusual, but fairly irksome when it happens. What's shown is post-subtraction in voxel mode. I don't have a low res model and I still don't know enough about retopo to follow why it might be needed for my application - the only operations in surface mode have been hide & smooth all so I'd assumed that wouldn't overstretch the mesh; obviously (see 1st line!) this assumption may well be incorrect. The bottom facing flat surfaces are the ones I didn't want smoothed (hinge assembly, catch) - there's a clear demarcation where the hidden surface ended, despite smoothing the edges of the hidden selection.

Bump?

About 5.6M at the moment - it'll be reduced for printing, obviously. Not sure if the image insert is functioning - I ended up using freeze instead of hide; it's OK, but I don't know how to avoid the obvious join lines.

I've got a model that's been created in Rhino, then exported as obj layers. I've subtracted layers (where Rhino's boolean difference failed), switched to surface mode and used surface hide to retain detail on hinges before using smooth all to smooth the rest of the model. Voxhide seemed to leave a border which was then smoothed, while surface hide does not. Is this the sensible way to keep specific bits of detail in a model, or is there a better way? Now if I can just work out some sensible settings for smooth all that closely mimic the effect of the voxel version....

Everything gets put through Netfabb prior to printing, so there's an opportunity to check measurements, but it'd be far preferable to make sure it's right first time. What I've been doing is to create a primitive (e.g. cylinder for a ring cutout) and using that, but it'd be nice to see a workflow that was based around sculpting jewellery. One thing I use in Rhino is gems with associated cutters - both get scaled the same, both get the same alignment. I think that would mean they need to be on different layers in 3D Coat, but I've yet to find a way to link transform operations to both of them (or work out if they ought to be primitives instead). That said, I'm still adapting to moving between voxel & surface modes. I'll have another look at retopo, thank you.

Morning... Another sort-of new user here. Previously I've only used 3D Coat to clean up jewellery models generated in Rhino, now I'm starting to look at sculpting them from scratch in 3DC for subsequent 3d printing. If I've understood things correctly, that generally means I've no reason to venture outside the sculpt room? I've not yet found much in the way of tutorials on modelling objects to specific real-world sizes (google fu failure, probably), would anyone be able to point me towards one or two, please?