Time for an update. First of all, I love Edward Hopper too and he is my favorite American Realism/impressionism artist.
Somehow several things aligned properly to get me over the STL-Conversion-dilemma. The first was redrawing all of the wall sections ensuring that they were fully solid and refining the brick laying technique. I grouped the wall substrate, laid out a section of guidelines where the bricks were 8"L and 3"H with the horizontal mortar space at 3/4" and vertical space at 5/8. Didn’t have to grid the entire wall. Copy/pasted the bricks in ever-enlarging groups until the wall was covered. I then went back and deleted brick over window and door openning.
Here’s the sequence. To ensure that the bricks meet nicely at the corners, I’m beveling the adjoining corner walls so the bricks meet at the corners. In the sequence you can see that I’m extending the bricks a scale 5/8" at the corner. I will hand sand the tiny brick extensions to give them the same 45º bevel. I understand that another way to accomplish this is to bevel the bricks in SU. I’ve done that in the past, but it means making the corner bricks “Unique” since all the bricks are a component, and it’s a bit finicky to do that tiny bevel. It will take just a few seconds to knock off the corners of the protruding bricks. There’s no rule that you have to 3D print everything.
Extruding one brick to the 5/8" reveal extrudes them all.
This view shows the bevel and scaling the bricks to all extend 5/8" past the corner.
After scaling:
And from the front.
Doing it this way, everything came out solid and the STL conversion worked well.
I noticed that the STL viewer did not showing a complete object, and yet when opened in the slicer, the complete object was there perfectly. Could be my troubles have been with the viewer misinterpreting the drawings and not the drawings themselves? For example: when I exported one of the walls, only the cornice showed in the viewer. I decided to take a chance and send the STL to the slicer, the entire wall was there in perfect order. For the rest of the time, I ignored how the STL appeared in the Mac Finder and just sent them on to the slicer.
The other annoyance that solved itself was the inability for my slicer to export, via WiFi, print files. It kept saying “Printer off line” and for months I was relegated to carrying a thumb drive down to the printer to produce work. I relogged onto ChiTuBox’s site and, voila, the unit transmitted all nine print files.
So I don’t have to get a new computer…yet. It’s still horribly slow when manipulating big files. I’ve gone back to the Classic Graphics Engine, by SU Tech’s suggestion, to have less glitching. It seems to be working… but I’m not so sure.
So here is the final drawing of Early Sunday Morning.
The roof and internal floors will be old school MDF, but all the vertial walls will be 3D printed. I’ve gotten two successful prints already.
The bricks extending out from the sides will key into slots on the adjoining wall, almost completely hiding the intermediate joints needed to get the walls to fit on the printer. That would be one advantage of laser cutting the walls, I wouldn’t need those joints. But the printed bricks’ resolution is incredible.
This one is hanging on the printer draining. I will clean it up today. That’s 2 down and 10 more to go!
I did some test renders in VRay to see about lighting. There is a stairway, but it will be very hard to really see.
I have to update an an earlier version I uploaded on the SU 3D Warehouse.