Hi guys and girls! I have this 3D model I made of our old house in Amsterdam (well, its facade anyway). I wanted to get it 3D printed but I need to get the two layers (brick layer and wall behind it) merged into one solid group and I then need to cut the model half way down, horizontally to allow top and bottom halves to fit within 500mm build area of the 3D printer. When I tried to merge the two layers, my PC just dies on me…?
Canal House.skp (2.7 MB)
My advice is always to work smarter even if you do need more computing power.
The bricks in your model are the killer for this. First consider that since the bricks are a solid group as is the face of the building behind, you probably don’t need to combine them into a single hunk of geometry in order to print.
Second for cutting the thing in half, I would make a copy of the groups and use a block to cut away what you don’t need of the back in each group. As for the bricks, I think it’ll be faster to edit each copy of the brick group and manually erase what you don’t need. A selection fence around the bricks to delete and a press of the delete key and you are done.
Here I’ve manually deleted the unneeded bricks. Then Trim to cut the facades.
I exported a single .stl file of both parts. It’s a bit large width-wise but my go to tester, i.materialise has no problem with the file. I have a problem with the price and I only selected the material I did because the preview shows better.
Tuitgeveltjes als deze staan veel in de Brouwersgracht, ik moet soms mijn dochter ophalen in de Palmstraat.
Close?
Grand - that, I can do! Makes sense. I had jumped to the conclusion I’d need to cut both layers at the tame time, but as you indicate, I can just cut them separately at the same point.
Naast de Bastille, no 246 Lijnbaansgracht.
Nou, da’s nog een hele wandeling! Niet direct ‘In de Buurt’
I don’t know is that matters yet. I downloaded it when you put it up and the outer shell was sweating enough, but not died…now, just finished it 
Canal House_d.skp (2.3 MB)
Made a CleanUp … too.
Yes. you could do the Outer Shell thing but that takes longer than leaving them as separate solid groups. Seems like leaving them is the “work smarter” option to me. That makes it easier to make other changes down the road, too.
Sure you are right. I was just curious if my laptop will survive or not… since it has been done and not to be completely waste the time and effort, just uploaded
Thanks guys! All very helpful - I split the house in two halves and cut the bricks manually! The Outer Shell thing was what was causing the original melt down I reported 
Should be good as long as you don’t let the magic smoke out.
