I’m pretty new to 3d printing but less new to sketchup and very new to cura.
I’ve browsed the forums here and have seen similar problems resolved by orienting faces and removing stray lines. I’ve inspected this simple model for over an hour looking for anything strange that would cause it to not be a solid. All the faces are properly oriented. I’m able to crawl around inside of the solid section and see that there are no burried faces or line segments. I was able to begin the print job on creality’s slicer software on another computer but on this machine I only have cura, which seems very unforgiving–even when I don’t have anything wrong in the model (so I think).
I have the ‘mesh tools’ plugin for cura. I made a very simple version of this which also said it wasn’t watertight, however I was able to slice it in cura. The one attached says it’s not watertight but it cannot slice it. Neither of the mesh tools fixes did anything beneficial to this model.
Please help!
Edit:
So this is really two questions. I mistakenly thought the ‘watertight’ error message was preventing me from slicing it somehow–even though my own question stated that “a simpler version” printed in spite of that error. The main question was “why won’t this slice?” The second one was “why isnt this watertight?” The former is solved. The latter I will check @colin 's solution as soon as I get a chance, which might be next week.
I appreciate the help and patience from everyone!
Your model looks fine to me in SketchUp. I exported it to .stl and uploaded that to i.materialise and there’s no problem shown with it there (except the price).
There may be something odd about the file. It being below the original hopefully doesn’t matter, Cura plops it down nicely on the printer bed. But, it then says it will take three days to print. That seems a bit long.
@Box I thought that as well so I made it to levitate 1mm but it gave the same message and wouldnt slice it.
I converted it to mm since I started using this computer. The first print was in inches and I didn’t realize how small my print bed was so I had to scale it down in the creality slicer software. That was my first failed attempt at printing this. It was going great until about 2 hrs in. I was using abs without a clue as to how to print with abs… Lesson learned.
@colin
I am new at this obviously. I beefed up the bottom portion of the model thinking it would be more stable to make such high walls that lack supporting structures. Perhaps I went overboard with the thickness.
I intend to use this as a concrete mold for making dumbbells and there would be a separately printed top lid (2 halves of a lid) to maintain centerness for the bar during curing.
So maybe it would print fine being as thin at the bottom as it is at the top and then my lid system would also maintain rigidity for the walls to support the weight of concrete without sagging. I have no idea as I havent even used pla yet. Just wingin it…
@RLGL
I circled around it multiple times looking for any corners outside the bounds of the print area. It has nearly a centimeter of margin on the sides and a handful for the height.
Last night I found an issue with the template that you happen to be using. The issue does affect exporting and saving. Copying your model into a different template file may make things work better.
Another thought: is it possible that any lines that I’ve doubled back upon would cause the model to be deemed ‘not watertight’?
For example when I make a line 6mm but then from the same origin I make a line 2mm in the same direction as the 6mm line and use that 2mm point to start a line in another direction. Does this extra line get exported as a fragment when the stl is generated?
My guess is that the print does not fit in the build space. You have room for the actual piece on the ender 3 but by default Cura is set to print a skirt which is beyond the print area. Reducing by 2% brings the skirt inside the print area, or open custom settings and set the adhesion to None to not print a skirt.
You did start from a blank template, and that’s the one that may have issues. Starting from any non-blank template, and deleting Sumele if she’s there, would have been ok.
