Has anyone have issues exporting a Sketchup model as an .stl and loading it into Preform? I get weird graphic glitches when orbiting the model and some triangulation appears. The model printed completely solid as well, which was hollowed out in Sketchup.
I’m not sure if it’s a corrupted sketchup file, or if preform has trouble reading .stl exports from sketchup, or if my program is corrupted.
The STL files that Sketchup generates are a bit strange. They often don’t really define a solid. For example, this one contains 215 separate shells that kind of cover the space, but don’t really define something that’s a clean solid. When you load one of these into PreForm, it uses a heuristic to try to make sense of it. It works pretty well for a lot of Sketchup files, but it’s kind of strange and can fail in some confusing ways.
If at all possible, it would be good to run the STL files through a mesh cleanup program (e.g. MeshMixer, Netfabb) before giving them to PreForm. That way you can give PreForm a better idea of what it is supposed to mean.
it really is amazing to me how many apps, 25 years into 3D modeling becoming a thing, still just can not conform to well established criteria for representing solidity.
Imagine if some companies made 1/4-20 screws that simply were not actually 1/4- while others made them that were not exactly 20…
