I am trying to cut a model into sections for easier printing. While I could just use plane-cut to slice through the model, but I want to avoid bisects features of the model.
Ideally what I would like to do is be able to follow the natural edges of the model; see the blue line in the images.
With a solid model, I could use Complexes (in Meshmixer), but in this case I need to cut through the model at each point, but not the entire entire plane.
If anyone had any ideas, guides, videos they could suggest, I’d really appreciate it.
Personally, I’d use Fusion360 (cuz I already have it installed, not because it’s particularly suited for that task) or Blender (much better I think, don’t have much experience with it), I think trying to do a boolean subtraction won’t result in what you want in meshmixer.
In fusion, if the triangles are low enough, I’d convert it to a brep and start deleting facets. Then stitch it back together.
Fusion gets so bogged down with meshes and can’t handle many triangles. I’ve had a hard time finding almost any objects that I’ve imported from an stl that haven’t been way too complex.
I assume it’s too big of a file for Tinkercad. It would be fairly easy to do in there if it isn’t.
You probably need to duplicate it and approach it as removing parts to create the two halves, and not as slicing it in half. (hope that makes sense)
I think your best bet is still meshmixer or meshlab.
If there is a simpler program I’d love to hear. Both of those are maddening to figure out.
-S
I was going to suggest TinkerCAD as well. I like how any positive object can be turned into a negative object, and overlapped. So it would be fairly easy to subtract out the bottom half, leaving the top section. Then copy the top section, negate it, and overlay onto the original leaving the bottom section.
It also helps that my level of design skills is generously described as “can assemble legos”. I’m still at the very steep part of Blender’s learning curve.
I think I understand. Are you suggesting I take ‘bites’ out of the model by defining multiple sketches and cut/extruding pieces away?
I should be able to handle this in Fusion. Once I export the finished half, I should then be able to edit each extrusion and reverse it. Hmmm. Might be messy, but should get the job done.
Exactly. Create cylinders or cubes or spheres or whatever it takes and then join and cut. The only problem I’ve had with this though is how fusion deals with meshes and gets bogged down. Maybe someone has a better way for converting or simplifying. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to do it with organic shapes created with image2surface or image to lithophane that are too complex.
-S
Unfortunately, STL files are a rather stupid file format as soon as you want to do any processing on it. If you had a step file, using Fusion would be a lot more doable and you don’t have the drawback of the mesh.
That being said, I have been using OpenSCAD to do stuff like that.
First convert it to a scad file to make the cuts more performant: http://jsfiddle.net/Riham/yzvGD/ (You can do it directly on an imported STL, but the performance will suck and even the smallest imperfection in the STL will bite you if you don’t do the conversion first)
Then use the difference() function to cut out what you don’t need. Once your happy with that you can use the difference of your original object and the new one you created to get the inverse.
Works really nice, assuming you know the measurements of everything, which usually isn’t the case.
If you have a programming background, this could work very conveniently, if not, OpenSCAD is not necessarily the most friendly to new users.
