Large size WSF printing, smooth enough for large print?

Hi there,

I just ordered my figure at 15cm height in WSF to take advantage of the new pricing and am excited.... but at the same time it hit me that it might not be tessellated enough to be smooth at that size.

https://www.shapeways.com/model/154582/heart_squeeze_15cm___6 inch_figure.html?gid=ug8857


Can someone take a look for me and let me know if it will be printed smoothly or not?

Thanks!!

Your item is set private, I cannot view it.

I'd say, if you remove smoothing groups on your item, and view it on your monitor at the printed size, and you don't see any triangles, you won't see any on the print either.

What I do is excessively smooth the object until it just doesn't hang my machine, and then optimize it back down to an acceptable level. That way the triangles will be more efficiently located where they are really needed.

Thanks for the examples!

I think I have a handle on it however, with a hollow 6 inch figure with many curved parts to the surface AND being hollow, I am having a hard time get the tessellation very smooth and keeping under the shapeways 65mb file size limit...

I'll keep trying, thanks again for the info man!

I think what Kaetemi is saying is that you should use a high polygon count to get a smooth surface to start with, then reduce the number of polygons (e.g. by quadratic decimation) as far as you can without affecting the smoothness too obviously. This is likely to produce a better effect than creating the object with the smaller number of polygons to start with.

I use quadratic decimation in Meshlab, and it seems to work best if you do it in stages (e.g. by reducing the number of triangles by half, which is the default), rather than trying to reduce to the desired number of triangles in one step. This can sometimes result in the object becoming non-manifold, but it should be fixable in NetFabb, and sometimes even fixes itself with further decimation.