Blckpstv Posted May 6, 2016 Share Posted May 6, 2016 Hello, I have made a shape from STL to Mesh. Added and subtracted few other elements in to it. But now I would like to split the whole object in to 2 halves for printing. Is their a way to do that. Quote Link to comment
AlanW Posted May 6, 2016 Share Posted May 6, 2016 Hi, Have you tried the Split Tool (L), you knife across the object and there are 3 options in 2 modes. HTH Quote Link to comment
zoomer Posted May 6, 2016 Share Posted May 6, 2016 The cutter knife tool works well to split solids. I think the erasure rubber does same by deleting parts of solids. Meshes do not behave so well in VW in general. The only way to convert a mesh directly into a generic solid I found, is by Push/Pull Tool in second mode, if you can find a suitable Faces that you can temporarily push about 1 cm out and back in again. This will not work if the mesh is too complex or has any holes. (In rare cases you can produce corrupt solids) In that case you have to go into the mesh group's lose 3D Polygons and try to delete double faces or close holes manually by adding new 3D Polygons. If a mesh is ok and used in Add Solids, converting the Solid into a generic solid should work too. For STL or 3D printing the geometry has to be air/water tight, so I would not risk anything by using Meshes in VW. Quote Link to comment
Kevin McAllister Posted May 6, 2016 Share Posted May 6, 2016 I think if you want a truly watertight form for printing I would do all your operations in NetFabb. It is designed for exactly what you're doing. VW doesn't work well with meshes. It sounds like you added and subtracted elements from the mesh in VW which will likely result in non-watertight solids. VW thinks its doing it properly, but often generates hollow solids with many unseen geometry errors. These will cause issues when you go to 3d print. Kevin Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted May 6, 2016 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted May 6, 2016 I think if you want a truly watertight form for printing I would do all your operations in NetFabb. It is designed for exactly what you're doing. VW doesn't work well with meshes. It sounds like you added and subtracted elements from the mesh in VW which will likely result in non-watertight solids. VW thinks its doing it properly, but often generates hollow solids with many unseen geometry errors. These will cause issues when you go to 3d print. Kevin This is sound advice. (I stopped myself from saying "solid advice," and I feel I did the right thing ) Even if you DO use Vectorworks' tools to split up a mesh, I almost always find I need to make the exported resulting model manifold (watertight) in a third party application after the fact. A brief guide on doing this here: http://3daddfab.com/blog/index.php?/archives/10-Automatically-Repair-STL-Files-in-2-Minutes-with-netfabb.html Quote Link to comment
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