I am playing with printing STLs exported by my mechanical engineering team at work. They are exports of large (20 ft container large) full assemblies. Solidworks handles the export decently, and besides the problems of thin-walled third party components, everything comes in, and slices well.
The problems are:
The slicer, ever dutiful, tries to replicate every screw hole in the model. This doesn’t really add anything to the printed model, but takes extra time and offers opportunities for gloppy overextrusion because I’m terrible at tuning my machine (different story)
Some components have geometry that’s both internal and external (think of a pipe coming out of a wall). I don’t care about the internal part, only the external.
The question is, does anyone know a way to take a full STL and sort of simplify it down to a surface representation, filling holes and spanning gaps? I imagine I could do it manually in something like Meshlab, or manually remove the geometry in Solidworks, but I wonder if there’s anything a bit more automatic.
SolidWorks has tools for simplifying the geometry. I don’t remember how to do it off the top of my head, but it would be before you export the stl files.
@Dale_Dunn It is in the options of the ‘save as’ dialog when you set STL as the file type. There is a slider to choose the quality(number of triangles) of the resulting export.
No, it’s not part of the stl export process. You’d create a simplified version of each part or assembly before the export. Call your VAR for detailed help, if you can’t find it in the SW help.
Ah yes, that’s what it was. SW help search wasn’t smart enough to be useful in finding ways to simplify geometry. Shoulda searched Google instead.
I’m curious to hear how it goes. It should produce watertight solids for individual parts that export as well as SW usually does. For assemblies saved as parts, you may not get solids, depending on the options you choose.