I need to 3D print the part in yellow but I can’t intersect the two groups because the case, in purple, isn’t a solid. I’ve imported the case model and it contains thousands of errors according to Solid Inspector. What’s the best way to deal with this?
I would copy the geometry from the purple thing that needs to be intersected with the yellow thing and paste it into the yellow thing’s group/component with Paste in place. Then I select all of the geometry in the yellow object, right click on it and choose Intersect Faces>With Selection. Finally erase what isn’t supposed to be the yellow object.
Note, you could select the geometry within the yellow object and use Intersect Faces>With Model but then you would have to construct the faces in the notches to make the thing a solid.
Looks like you deleted something you shouldn’t have. Maybe you just need to be a little more precise in what you are deleting. Or maybe you haven’t got all of the faces intersected.
How large is this thing?
Share the .skp file so we can see what you are working with.
This is a common problem particularly with imported triangular mesh files. Stl is often extremely over-triangulated and may contain very small “splinters” that cause problems in SketchUp. Especially if the case is not large, you should try scaling the model up by 1000 before doing the intersection.
Too big to drag-and-drop to the forum so here’s a link.
OK. This is going to take a little time because the Pelican case model is so bad. Unneeded nesting and child objects. Excess triangulation. Back as soon as I can unless someone else decides to get involved.
Indeed, I assumed it was me doing something stupid. I tried exploding it but as you say many, many child objects make that difficult. I have asked Peli if they have a cleaner 3D model.
In addition to scaling up as @mihai.s suggests, I would also suggest extruding the back of the yellow frame out a little more so that you don’t created unwanted triangles at the back that will require more work to clean up.
Personally I would scale the model up by a factor of 1000 and model as if millimeters are meters. You can then export the .stl file as meters and import into the slicer as millimeters.