I'm working on my first shapeways model (an HO scale house) and it's been kicked back a couple of times for having walls too thin. The issue was with the roof. Blender is funny about measurement, if you scale an object while not in edit mode, it scales the measurement as well. So while I thought I had a roof that was 1mm in thickness, it was actually a quarter of that. But one thing I noticed is that looking at the proper scale, what I thought was a perfectly acceptable height and separation for shingles are remarkably thin. Has anyone modeling such a house gotten anything resembling a shingled roof texture? Should I just upload and have it printed smooth? In the following images, the prominent cube is a 1mm block, for measurement. Blender file attached.
Interesting, has anyone used anything like this? It seems to be just a shingle print with adhesive backing, but I'm wondering if that would be the best option?
I just used the Rusty Stumps roofing shingles last weekend and love them. I've been using them for a while. I was actually going to suggest that you model the roof with no detail and instruct/let the buyer use their favorite roofing material. Nice model and kudos for the blender usage!
Excellent. Thanks so much for the suggestion! I also noticed that some people were recommending a program called Netfabb to check for additional errors. I've used it and found several red areas, but it's still identifying some errors that I can't for the life of me find. I don't suppose anyone would be able to take the attached .obj (exported from Blender) and help me find any errors? It takes days for me to find out from the Shapeways team that there's a problem that won't allow it to be printed, and this is to be a gift for my father on his birthday for his model railroad layout.
Yeah, something is wrong. I'm attaching a screen grab from 3ds max when I import your obj. I didn't flip the xy direction, so ignore the object orientation. If you post the blend file I'll look at it for you. or PM me if you want me to look at it w/ out posting it publicly.
Hi Kepardue, I just ran some checks on your .obj file using a combination of Accutrans3D and NetFabb Basic. Using Accutrans at first, it reported 3 or more edges per vertice. Using NetFabb's analysis tool, it shows over 300 holes and more than 2000 flipped triangles. Using Netfabb to repair and export the model results in a manifold mesh, but with odd surfaces across windows. I'm thinking, you need to go back and check the geometry of the window frames and make sure that they are all closed shells or that they are properly closed/merged with the walls of you (cool) model house. Send me a PM if you need help getting things sorted. Paul
Masking tape is a very inexpensive option for asphalt shingles: Make sure you cut your shingle strips from the centre of the tape - never use the outside edges of the tape (there's a lot of fuzz on them).
I think it was just the way you exported the obj. in blender when you export to obj, use these settings: I'm seeing a lot of open edges and multiple duplicate verts in the wall piece. The screen grab below shows the errors in red. From what I see, it looks like you made one section of siding and then copied that up to build the wall. That means that there are overlapping faces at every intersection. You basically need to delete a lot of unneeded stuff and you should be ok. I tried some automated things but it seems that some of the verts might be "off" a little along with some normals problems. Maybe try rebuilding the wall from the elevation side. Once you have it built with the holes in it, slice the mesh to create your slats and extrude the poly's to created the siding effect.
edited. I found that you can fix the stl directly from blender with netfabb. Export to binary stl from blender. Open the stl in netfabb studio. Go to extras and choose repair part. On the right side, click automatic repair. Use default. On the right repair pane, choose apply repair. Go to part>export>stl. use the default repair on export.