A friend showed me this model last night in hopes it could be 3D printed. dodgebody_repaired.stl (789.5 KB)
As is, printing the model solid was going to be like $1,300-$1,900 on Shapeways, so I was hoping that I could thin the walls to save a lot of money on the printing costs. What I have done is cleaned up a few annoyances on the outside and got the overall shape as good as I can. 010 Gen6 Dodge 007 Empty Shell.skp (1.1 MB)
What I am shooting for now is something that looks more like this injected plastic body:
Minimum wall thickness on Shapeways is 0.3mm (supported wall) or 0.6mm (unsupported wall). Printing at the minimum can be brittle so after asking their experts community, I’m thinking about 1mm thickness might be ideal. I need to essentially build up the inside of this model 1mm to where it can print. I was trying to figure out a way on my own but it was a very imprecise waste of my time. So, if is there an easier way to what I am talking about, I am all ears!
Note, if any segments are 1mm or less, temporarily scale up the model 10-1000x to manipulate the model. SU may leave out face for extrusions if the geometry is too small.
Jordan, I’ve never messed with a model like this, but I’m going to throw out a suggestion.
First, I’m assuming this model is only a skin. If this is correct, maybe try copying the model and scale down so the two groups are 1 mm apart. After that you will have to group the two models, and afterword enter that group, explode both and draw the related faces. There may be an extension to help with this part, but would look to the rest of the community for insight on that.
Good luck!
Jordan: Your model is not solid ie water tight while your friends model as been repaired to make it water tight probably with Netfabb. You would probably be better off using that model. You can import that model into su but the issue will still remain of making it a solid shell ie thin wall structure. I do not know of any SU plugin do to that but, have not tried the joint push pull recommended above. Blender has a tutorial that you may find interesting but that starts with a mesh model to start with. http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/02/04/modeling-3d-printing-shapeways/.
Blender will import the stl file directly and following the tutorial there may allow you to solidify in that.
Netfabb has a cloud service on there site where in they will check your model for free and fix suggest you use that also.