Looking at an stl of 3d topography with appx 500k faces and want to cut it into a grid of squares, each of which will be grouped as a CNC cut file.
Brought it into Sketch Up with Skimp.
This comes up a lot for us. My process is analog and slow - inserting planes, intersecting faces with model, deleting adjacent areas…
There has to be a better way.
Right?
What does the geometry of this 3D topography look like?
What does that grouped grid of squares look like for CNC?
At least an image.
Can’t post the image, but think of a four x four foot square of terrain, with a height ranging from 3 to 12 inches. Need to cut this model into 16 one x one foot tiles.
Inserting planes, exploding them into the terrain group, intersecting faces, copying and deleting geometry of alternate squares, etc., and then grouping each tile works, but takes appx forever.
It will be necessary to work at a larger scale (maybe 100x) to avoid problems with too small edges.
Splitting a surface into groups (almost just two clicks), using Face(s) to Group(s) extension
2 Likes
Wow - that was the answer!
Thank you so much!
A very nice solution 
1 Like