New Guy - A Few Pointers Needed

Hey Guys,

Im very new to 3d modelling / printing Figured it sounded interesting so wanted to give it a go so have decided as a first model I want to make a iPhone doc with passive amplifier.

I have fired up sketchup and put together a rough shape, hollowed it out, added a path for a charging cable and added the first horn mow when I run it through Solid Inspector i get a few areas show up a thin wall and I would like to clarify what is going to come out as a physical wall.

Form what I understand in my model all of the White/Grey is going to be the "outside" and anything inside of the purple is going to be solid. If so why is it showing up issues where the horn meets the cable path and iPhone interface.

I would appreciate if someone could look over what I have to save redoing to much if i have to change my design. I will add some screensots of the parts that show up in Solid inspector. Also how will that affect the pricing of the part as in this state shapeways shows it as costing $55 Is this correct and haw can it be made cheaper and still be functional

http://imgur.com/a/SzGcn

I also have issues with this surface as I cannot cut out the section that is overhanging so would be a Thin face






Thanks again

Hi,

I like the design... I don't have solids inspector on the computer I'm on, but from a quick look there are a couple of things you could clean up.

First, the 'inner' horn appears to be a separate object - you need to combine this with the body (for example, the opening of the horn exists twice, once on the horn itself, and again on the aperture on the body. This has to be a single edge.) To do this, select the inner horn object, choose Edit>Intersect Faces>With model.

That will meld the two objects into one.

Next, there's some inside faces that need removing.

They are on the inner wall of the horn to the right (when viewed from the front). Edit: The kidney shaped outline from your screen grabs.

See the attached pic. As a pointer I've deleted half the faces within the outline that forms the intersection. The view is 'inside' the solid.

Hope that helps!

View attachment dock.tiff

Thanks Gadget life. I had given up on geting a reply to this topic, wasnt sure if i had posed my question correctly or if the community isnt as friendly as I first thought.

I think I have managed to remove all of the stray interior faces so the interior and exterior horns are joined this is the part where I was struggling to get my head around what is interior and exterior. In the end I ended up shrinking down the wall thickness on the central column so the horns didn't overlap into that as much.


I also did a design with 4 escape holes in the bottom but have misplaced the sketcup file im not sure if it is worth putting them back in or if it will be fine with just the two. They are 2x2mm

Thanks again for taking the time to take a look,

You can see the 4 hole version here https://shpws.me/nzHr

Also is there any nice tutorials on getting some nice renders of your objects as I would like to make some to give as gifts but would like to show the person a render to see if they like it first.


The other thing Im not sure on is in the Shapeways render it shows that the horns are stepped and not perfectly smooth, will this smooth out during the printing/polishing process or do I need to try and add more polygons to make this smoother in the software.

Hi,

The material guidelines say 2 of 2x2mm holes per interior section, so it sounds like your 4 hole model will be fine. (You need to make your model public so others can see it - do this in Edit mode on the model page.)

As far as rendering is concerned, your best bet is to do this in Blender. There is a bit of a learning curve involved but plenty of online help out there, particularly Youtube. (The best render is, of course, to photograph the model you had printed!)

You can import the .DAE (Collada) files produced by Sketchup right into Blender, set textures, lights, camera then render. It's not quite as straightforward as that but... Youtube!

Good luck!

Edit: I wouldn't worry too much about smoothness - WSF (the default nylon material) loses a little on curves due to the nature of the printing process - there will always be a hint of 'stepping' on curves - it's not terrible, just not porcelain smooth. Also the exterior curves on your model have a small radius, so the number of segments that make up a curve is less important for the fact I just mentioned. On the other hand, larger radii will require a greater polygon count. (Hint: browse other models of the type you wish to create - look at the photos, then look at the static Shapeways render to see how refined the source model is.)

In general I would say that what you see in the Shapeways render is what you will get in terms of polygons.

It depends a lot on the size of the object but for yours imo you probably would notice the angular nature of the curves in wsf, especially the horns. As mygadgetlife says, they effect won't be quite so obvious, especially if you go for polished, but if you are looking for something that definitely looks round/truly curved you need more geometry/polygons. StonySmith and Stop4Stuff have made several posts on this subject (and others too, I just cannot remember their names). In Blender this would be added via the Subdivision Surface Modifier - maybe Sketchup has something similar?

Good luck!

I had another thought about your model - well Sketchup generally - which is worth mentioning again.

Sketchup works better in large scale ie a factor of 100.

So an object you want to be 40x50mm would be drawn in Sketchup 4000x5000mm.

This won't help the smoothness of curves as the number of polygons is the same.

How it does help is when you are troubleshooting the model and zooming close up to vertices - I find that at real world scales Sketchup can't 'draw' tiny details close up, something to do with the way it handles Z-buffering I guess.

When your large scale model is complete, just group everything then scale by a factor of 0.01. It's pretty accurate, but don't rely on upscaling again to get the original model as some precision is lost in the calculations and faces/vertices tend to be ever so slightly 'out', enough to upset the inference engine anyway.

In essence, I always keep a large scale working model, with the 'real' scale model the one I submit to Shapeways.

Thanks again,

I tried that Subdivision Surface on sketchup that AmLatch sugguested and it took forever on my laptop to process and ended up wrecking the model it ended up filling in the horns and twisting some of the faces out of proportian so had to revert to a previous save. so it looks like it may be a manual thing to add in the extra polygons on the horns. not sure how hard that will be so may end up making them again.

I havent found any issues yet with sketchup at actual size yet but im still a newbie and havnt progressed to any complicated designs yet so will have to start looking at making things in large scale then shrinking them down.