Help with solids
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Good morning All.
I use SU every day, but only in the cabinet arena with CabinetSense.
In this case I am working with importing a human head as a 3ds file and need to section it. The model comes from http://www.facegen.com/sampleExports.htm
I have TIG's slicer but it won't work because the model is not a solid.
I have TT's solid inspector but I guess the model is not enough of a solid for that to work and look for errors.
Also, the model seems to be way out of scale when imported.
My first task is to figure out how to make this a solid.
Any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated.
SU8
Thanks.
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A manifold Solid needs to be a single 'container' - i.e. a group or a component-instance.
It must contain nothing except geometry - i.e. edges and faces.
It CAN contain construction geometry - guide-points and guide-lines - because they do not interact with the geometry, but I'd leave them out too...
So that means no nested text, dimensions, sub-groups or instances, images etc.
So delete 'illegal' objects, or Explode nested 'containers' until you have the single 'geometry-set inside one container'...Also the geometry itself is very specific.
Every edge must have exactly two faces.
That means that you can have NO:
- faceless edges...
- edges with only one face - e.g. edges around a hole or as the side of a flap - no matter how tiny the hole might be...
- edges with three or more faces - e.g. internal partitions or shelves...
- two otherwise solid forms that 'join' at a shared edge - e.f. two cubes touching along an edge, where that edge then has 4 faces !
- rare quirky coplanar faces which share common edges - these faces shouldn't exist because SketchUp should auto-merge them, but some operations in code can result in them...
TT's Solid Inspector is good at highlighting the issues.
Tools like my SolidSolver have limited success fixing badly un-solid forms because one false move early on results in unexpected deletions to make a solid of some sort...
So armed with Solid-Inspector and the SectionPlane too look inside the forms to remove partitions etc.
Overdraw hole edges to heal them etc etc... -
When you download the one called 3d print mesh solid as a 3ds zip file it is actually a solid.
When you import it into SU it is in a container, if you explode it once it will show as a solid component. -
Thanks!
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