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struggling with 3d printing


Go to solution Solved by spacepainter,

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Hallo,

 

The process of printing a coloured object in shapeways , the online printing service that allows your object to be beamed to the physical world using SLS ( powder of any material thinkable and laser ) allowing colourprints, has presented me with some difficulties that I hope some forum users may help me clarifying.

 

I am using Photogrammetry to obtain a textured object, that is a sculpture of two people on a couch in a nice theatre dress. I am very happy that the scan turned out well ( Using my livingroom as a studio ) despite it being only midres ( due to memory restrictions ) and that meaning the texture is also midres, because the program ( "photoscan", a nice application built in Russia )  projects the texture on the faces.

 

It is possible to import this sculpture in 3DCoat, I found out after some trouble ( the object only imports right when you select "voxels" although you should import it as surface to get the colours with it. )

The object is a shell full of holes because the backside is not scanned; my room is too small to go all around.

I import the shell using import with thickness. This is very limited because the thickness is added randomly and affects the delcately obtained features of the model, putting polygons inthe front , while ideally it would add them only in the back of the shell without affecting the defining surface.

 

I cannot find a way to add mass to the sculpture ( a prerequisite for printing, the shapeways machine won't accept very thin shells) preserving the skin of the complex surface.

Is there a possibility masking the front? It could be filling in my sculpture with "clay" without affecting the outside?

I am struggling with this problem for a long time so I would be thankful if anyone knows an answer to this problem ( which is probably easy if you know more than the basics of CGI like me ).

 

 

 

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Hi sciencepainter

 

From your post count it looks like you're pretty experienced so apologies if this misses the mark, but have you tried Fill voids in the voxel mode?

post-38412-0-83492600-1424537628_thumb.p

 

I wonder if the close invisible hulls may be of use too...

 

EDIT: Additionally if you export as an STL file it should create a solid model automatically I believe

Edited by arumiat
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I imported one of my more complicated Photogrammetry models into surface mode. By using Close mesh and using the Inner thickness ext which extrudes in the inverse of your models normals direction I was able to get the extrusion in the right direction but also had some problems on the front and of course the back side is not pretty which the extrustion along the normals which is not the fault of 3DC but simply the direction of the normals. On this model like yours, I did not take 360 degrees of photos around the object.

 

The problems on the front of my model is I think due to a dirty model. unwelded vertices, duplicate vertices, faces etc... Maybe some normals facing the wrong direction.

On a more simple model and with the same settings I had no problems, shown in picture. I would check your model to see if it is dirty if you have not done so.

 

Even then I am not saying it will make a good model for printing, just throwing out some ideas...

Really the best thing to do is retake the photos using the full 360 degrees if possible... a lot less problems this way.

post-518-0-61238000-1424541861_thumb.png

Edited by digman
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some updates:

fill voids: does not fill every void.

Export stl gives no texture and does not make solid inside.

 

Thicken inside works better than I thought!

The hull is a mess though with normals pointing everywhere so it is a lot of work but may offer possibilities! Maybe I will try some autocleaning filters in meshlab first .

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I think it can be done using a combination of voxilize, smoothing and voxlayers. Before it was not possible to switch between voxels and surface and keep the colours.

Also the voxellayer has been enriched by some beautiful controls over direction of extrusion of the layer: normals or viewdirection etc.! And other things like merging

several layers together in the process have been made possible.Thank you Andrew.

So I'd say it's solved although I need to do much work still. Thanks for helping me find answers! :)

Edited by spacepainter
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