Hey, I have a question about this model I've uploaded. https://www.shapeways.com/model/956782/srbtail.html?li=my-mo dels&key=c09a113e94618affa8ea3cb0a39a6514 The SW model has smooth sides and not faceted as shown on this rendering. I realize that the conversion from SW to stl. is going to break the model into sections, but this looks a bit extreme. My question is will this model likely print out with that many visible faces or is it simply a rendering issue and the model will be fairly rounded? If it's the model, how would you guys recommend I fix something like this? Thanks, BIll
In general the Shapeways render shows what you get. The facets would appear on the finished model, but depending on the material would be more or less obvious. Many software packages have a render view that is more smooth than the underlying mesh. Shapeways prints the mesh. To fix this, the basic cut-off cone structure needs more vertices either by starting with circles/cylinders with more vertices or by using some kind of Subsurface modifier/function
See this thread - SW has a few export options that affect faceting, and apparently also the choice of SW tool for creating an object may influence the result.
The basic answer here is that you must have MORE facets on your model to make it print smoother. This little writeup may also help shed some light on the subject. http://www.stonysmith.com/wired/scaling.asp In ANY design program, you need to turn off "phong shading" or "smooth shading" so that you can actually see the facets.
The only issue with the more facets is as I understand it, Solidworks doesn't model based on facets. Perhaps when I do the stl conversion there is a setting I need to adjust to output a higher resolution stl? As far as the shading, again there is no facets on the solidworks model so I don't think that would make a difference. Thanks every one. I now know it's the model and not just the render. I'll have to rethink it and figure out a better way to get it to shapeways. Bill
Yes, that helps a lot. Kinda sucks I have to remodel the whole part, but if it gets the results then it's worth it. Thanks a million! Bill
SW is a solid-modeller package, so the fault is in the way it translates your smooth geometric primitives to triangular surface meshes when you export to STL format. I'm not familiar with the commands in SW (I'm an AutoCAD guy...), but somewhere there'll be a setting that controls how "smooth" the translation is - find it and set it higher. (A quick googling suggests it might be a setting called "Resolution"?) I know that AutoCAD uses a command called FACETRES to hold this setting - if it is set low then the export has lots of visible facets, but if set high then the resulting STL is a lot smoother even though it comes from the exact same solid model. And for whatever reason, AutoCAD has FACETRES set at low value by default! It makes for smaller STL file sizes, but at a cost... Hope this helps!