Hello All,
I’m new to 3D Printing, and recently purchased a Creality CR-10S for work related printing. Since I’m new to this, I’m not really sure how to go about making sure my models are watertight. As far as I can tell, I’m doing modeling correctly, but I’m not finding tons of information out there to ensure I am. When I upload my model in Cura, it gives me the “manifold” notification, however it still slices and from what I can tell thus far, still seems to be printing. (I’m currently attempting to print this model: geiger counter lid.skp (343.2 KB) and but I just wanted to make sure that in the future I can figure this stuff out on my own.
One thing you can do to start is get Solid Inspector2 and TT_Lib from the Extension Warehouse. That can help you identify issues that prevent SketchUp identifying the object as solid.
Here you can see there are a few stray edges, some surface borders which implies holes in the surface and lots of internal face edges which indicates internal faces. Most of these will need to be fixed manually.
You can edit the group and take care of those things. Might be easiest to hide the flat bottom face temporarily so you can access the geometry.
FWIW, with the right work flow you can prevent a lot of these problems from occurring in the first place. It takes some understanding of the tools, of course, but it will come.
Here I’ve cleaned up your model. Compare it to yours.
I noticed that you are using Architectural units, precision is set rather coarse for something this size and you have Length snapping enabled. In Window>Model Info>Units you can change the units to something appropriate like Decimal Inches, set the Display Precision higher and turn off Length Snapping.
Sage advice from Dave as always.
I have nothing to compare my experience to but my printer software (Flashprint for my Guider II is very tolerant of my modelling efforts.
A few times I’ve given up chasing down tiny holes in meshes only to find the software running a repair utility that either repairs or ignores them. Woohoo!
Has anyone else had a similar outcome?
All slicers I have used have a repair facility, and Prusa’s repairs automatically. My resin printers seem to be more tolerant than my fdm. The file format can also influence how errors are dealt with. I never leave anything to doubt and ensure models are manifold when exported. Other modeling software I use makes everything manifold inherently, so there are never any problems.
