Adventures in 3D printing Sketchup models

olishea

Thanks, they are cool shapes but incredibly difficult to model, each one takes a few hours. Yeah meshlab looks awesome, will be a great tool for shelling things.

I'll chat with CNC company and see what they say. I doubt I can reduce the cost by 8 times!! If they were £50 in aluminium, then maybe, but not £420! They didn't even give me a stainless quote because I know it will be crazy! Oh and i know the above models can not be manufactured by CNC, before anyone tells me. They were just for 3D printing.

olishea

Does anyone know how to export sketchup quads as actual quads when exporting obj

Or is there a file type that actually maintains quads?

Any quad mesh I make, whether it be in sketchup or wings turns out triangulated in meshlab. I've tried stl and obj import and they both have triangles. hmmmm.....

xiombarg

I'm stretching my memory here, but I know that some programs like Maya require modeling in quads (for clean results) BUT then when rendering it triangulates everything as the finished product, which leads me to think that triangulation is usually the case(?).

Maybe Autodesk 123D or Blender? Both are free and might be worth a shot. The 123D interface is similar to Autocad, which is old school and archaic and sucks in my opinion. But I'm just wondering if other programs have exporters that even though they export to the same file types still might keep things in quads once exported?

xiombarg

@olishea said:

I used meshlab not mesh mixer to create those (with immense difficulty!)....but i was just wondering what you thought of mesh mixer. I saw some videos and was blown away, especially the hollowing out a shell feature.

@unknownuser said:

Oli, for the CNC'd parts, did you optimize the model for the process? ...or did you just get a quote for the same model that you used for 3D printing? I'm guessing the cost may be significantly less if you can save them repositioning time.

No I just sent them the stl file.

How do I go about this? Any links?

There are CNC service sites (like Ponoko) that give details on how to optimize. Sorry I don't have links off hand, but do a search and I'm sure you will get a lot of results.

olishea

Thanks again. I don't want this thread to descend into troubleshooting, so I have posted my other questions in another thread. I got a reply off the CNC company about optimisation, gonna have a phone call with them tomorrow, but they are more than willing to help get this project off the ground and show how to reduce manufacture cost. Fingers crossed!