Hello everyone. Is there a trick for setting the sensitivity of Preform’s optimization step with regards to internal geometry? Ex. Can you tell Preform an object is solid even if there is internal geometry or, conversely, force it to keep all internal geometry?
Basically, I received a sculpt from a client that was created in Zbrush and has multiple sub tools all merged together. This created internal geometry that Preform thinks is meant to be a hollow. I can’t find an easy way in either Maya, ReMake, or Magics to get rid of the offending interior geo. I know Preform can sort out this stuff, but need some way of telling it how aggressive to be. Is there a flag I can run at launch via Terminal?
Yes, MeshMixer is a good choice for this. You can use it to tell PreForm exactly what each of the different shells in the STL file represent. Here’s a link to that part of the MeshMixer doc, although that’s mostly concerned with the case where your shells intersect each other. It doesn’t sound like you have any of that, is that correct? That’s the hard case, so you should find it’s pretty straightforward.
I as well was thinking “your answer lies with Booleans”, but the I realized how utterly unhelpful that is without lots more detail, so forget I said anything.
Thanks, all. Sadly, booleans aren’t working out for me in this case because of the complexity of the interior geometry. (I’ve tried both Maya 2017’s and Meshmixers.) I’ve also tried Meshmixer’s Make Solid to no avail as it maintains the interior geo. I even tried manually deleting the interior faces, but still not the full results I wanted. I think I might just be stuck on this one.
You don’t need to merge meshes/use booleans
The vast majority of my prints are made up of multiple meshes that are intersecting, they all print just fine.
The print will work just fine but, because of how the multiple meshes were sculpted together, it creates a hollow inside the print that I wanted to avoid. In the end, I’m just going to have to live with it and boolean out some drain holes I guess. Thanks all.
It’s a hodgepodge of pieces forming a turtle. So, you can imagine that the upper and lower portions of the shell are separate geo but their interior surfaces are curved inward so that, when put together, only the rims intersect. When I boolean anything, the inner hollow remains an issue. After days of trying things, I’m just going to live with the hollow.
Ah yeah, if you’re combining organic objects that way it can often create empty spaces in places. In that case you could use Zremesher to try and make a single closed mesh or you’d have to do a lot of work.