I have some questions concerning how smooth this object will be when printed. It has facets which I don't want printed, it has to be rounded. It was designed in 3ds max, and I have applied subdivision to it, it now has 16,344 triangles, but it seems that only smooths the edges of the facets, it doesn't smooth the entire object. Several times I've increased the subdivisions but crashed the application. I suppose I could increase the subdivision to the point just before the application crashes but it seems that even when increasing the subdivision, I still end up with facets with rounded edges. How do I make this rounded? Thanks.
It depends on the size, but most of those lines will probably show. You could use Polished WSF and that would make it a lot smoother.
before models get printed, do they go through a smoothing process? or are they converted to subD meshes? i'm concerned about faceting as well. i have a model i built in ZBrush which i then decimated to about 400k polys. there's minor faceting. will it get rounded off in say, glazed ceramic? thanks for any info!
Shapeways doesn't do any software smoothing, but with ceramics you will see smoothing because of the glaze, see the ceramics design rules page for more details
Size is about 5.5" X 1.75" X1.9". This for a car model, so it will have finishing work done to it; as sanding with fine sandpaper to smooth the printer steps, primering, more fine sanding and a finish coat of paint and clear coat paint, which will make the object reflective. The car is quite rounded, so it's necessary to not have facets. I don't want to spent time building up the facets with filler putty, and then sanding them down. I know I'll have a bit of finish work but want to keep it minimal.
Like I said, order in Polished WSF. It'll be put through a tumbler that will reduce the faceting. I know there is a way to subdivide it in blender, I'm just not sure how to do that. I know how to do it in Sculptris if you can export to OBJ (or export to anything blender imports and export as OBJ). In my experience these programs can handle more triangles than my software of choice (keycreator)
I can export as OBJ from 3ds max and have Sculptris so I'll try that. Thanks and I'll check back later with the results.
If you make the facets smaller than the "minimum detail" resolution of the material they should appear smooth when printed. For WSF, 0.1 mm sized should be fine. Greetings Karl Heinz
how big of a mesh is reasonable to upload and print? as long as it's under 65mb on disk, could the mesh be over a million polygons? is there a "between x and y" number of polygon range?
I have attempted to load the file into Sculptris but got a "too many triangles" message. I rework a part that had 6 triangles converging at a point (hoping that was the problem) but got the message again. Googling the problem, I found something about loading into Blender and something about triangles but it was beyond me.
I have subdivided the object in 3ds max to about 400,000 polys and downloaded it to Shapeways. The render with 400,000 polys is identical to the render with 2900 polys. Why is that? I thought the greater the subdivision, the rounder the object.
can you specify what render you're talking about? you mean the preview on Shapeway's site? do they look the same before exporting them from Max or Sculptris? you could check if you have any edges that are "creased" or try softening the normals (not sure how to do that in Max...)
Yes, the render in Shapeways. They look much smoother in Max before exporting. I understand when printed the model will look the same as the render in Shapeways. When making the model(this is a car model) I could sand off the creases, but I'm concerned about the flat spots on the surface. I don't want to spend and lot of time loading on putty and sanding it. This is the first time I've made an organic model so I don't know what to expect.
This is the image of the object with nearly 400,000 polys. Size: 5.5"X 1.7" X 1.8" ( 14 X 4.44 X 4.56 mm)