Hi Danny,

>>I tried the planar surface at first, as well, but I could only get it to shell at 0.4, how did you manage 3 ?


I just used planer then shell. Have attached file, this is with a 3.3 normal shell.


- Steve

Hi,

>>but i had major troubles when i exported the part via STL

STL??

I shelled your object to normal 2. Then exported to Sat and Step. Sat did give some model errors when importing into another CAD, but that was due to limits and where easily repaired. Step had no problems.


- Steve

hi..

export as a STL...ups..sorry..stereolithography

usually the rapidprotos favour this 3dformat..at least in our part of the world..muahmuah

best wishes,
marco

Hi Marco,

>>export as a STL...ups..sorry..stereolithography

Sorry,.. I do know what STL is, it is just I did not notice it in the export options (not something I have ever needed to use). I have now found my glasses.

I have just exported using STL and seeing no problems.

I have attached the STL output from the model you posted (with a normal 2 shell)


- Steve

Hi Marco, it is actually a lot more difficult to calculate the shell on such things that you might think at first. MoI's sheller is not very advanced, it just does not have the facilities inside of it to calculate an offset where the result has a different vertex structure than the starting shape.

Here is a bit of an explanation for what I mean. Say you take just these 5 separated surfaces:



Then if I offset them by 10 units as individual surfaces, I will get this:



Here is another view:



Note how there is not an equal amount of spacing in the gaps between each piece - that means that these pieces do not meet up in a single point even though the original surfaces met at a single vertex point.

If I untrim all of these surfaces to get their underlying planes, and look at it from the underside, you can see this:



So this is the kind of structure that would need to be created in this case:



I will take a look at it and see if I am missing something in using the shell function that would handle this kind of "deviating vertex" type situation, but I think that you may need to use a different program that has a more advanced shelling function than MoI for doing this.

If you offset by only a very small amount, then those 2 deviating vertices that I showed above do not get separated by very much distance, and if it is not too big of a distance that is not too much of an error to have them represented by just one vertex, that is why using a smaller distance can produce an ok result, although probably the one that you had problems doing STL with had too big of a gap between some of the trim boundaries and the vertex.

- Michael

hi michael,

thanks for this detailed explanation!!..

cheers&thanks again,
Marco

ps: MOI is really saving by butt here at our design department.

Hi Marco, I looked into it some more, and the problem does seem to be that the geometry library that I'm using currently just assumes that the final result of the shell will have just one offset vertex to match each vertex of the original object.

That is the case for 3-sided corners like the corner of a box, or for things that are totally symmetrical but not for cases where many pieces of different angles touch at a single point like in your case - like I showed earlier in this case there should be 3 vertices created in that central area instead of one, even though the original shape has just one vertex in the center.

I have sent this example to the people who make the geometry library that I am using.

Hopefully they will be able to improve it to handle this case as well, I'll let you know what I hear back from them.

- Michael

ioco

I saved the 3dm file from MoI as an .obj file and rendered in Carrara.

Is there, visually, a problem enough to be, in most circumstance, seriously concerned?

Brian

Hi Brian. I guess it depends on who makes the final judgement of what is acceptable or not. In your render, those interior surfaces are reflecting light. Paying clients would probably not accept it. Especially in the jewelry industry where beauty is found in the small details. Everything must be perfect...

jonah

I think Marco mentioned exporting as an STL for rapid prototyping?

That definitely needs a well formed mesh - the rapid prototyping machines form slices from the mesh, it tends to need a different set of stuff than what can maybe be acceptable for a rendering...

- Michael

Hi Marco, if you want to shell to the inside then one way to get it done is to use Edit/Separate to break your object into individual surfaces, then shell all of those to produce a bunch of individual solids, then boolean union those all together, then a bit of trimming off the bottom part and then a construct/Planar on the open edges and you should have a valid shape.

That's what I did to get the attached version - this one should now generate a proper STL file for you.

Let me know if you need more details on these steps or if you just need it of a different thickness let me know and I will make that for you.

- Michael

buh..hi everyone..

8am local time and almost 6000 replies to cover..;]

i had no troubles whatsoever getting this poly-thing into Hypershot or into Metasequoia (thats quite an odd workflow..:]]..but Metaseq comes in handy for fast poly modeling and than maybe a quick clay-rendering in Parthenon with GI), but as - in this case - for the RPs(rapidprot..) i really needed "hart facts" as in IGES, STL or SAT.

the part is actually already in production but because of a rather tight time schedule, we had to give it to a "traditional" model maker, because none of the RPs were actually capable of producing these parts(there are more of them) in time and quality.. i will post some pictures of the final object(s) next week..done in PMMA

thanks to all the helping hands&best greetings,
marco

btw. are there any plans for the future to support the DXF-format natively?..at least as an import-feature..i spotted the 3dmCurves2DXF, but that just covers the output..

Hi Steve

> I just used planer then shell. Have attached file, this is with a 3.3 normal shell.

PHEW! you mean millimeters, the original file was in cm so I was quoting .4cm

Thanks for that.

Why use shelling? So no problem :)
One 3D "Scale" + "Planar" of the base and you have a perfect gem :)
Thickness as you want
Of course the "original" must perfect before the Scale ;)
The trick is draw an helpers line between larger extremities and Scale is picking from the middle of this line to the end

Hi Pilou - scaling is certainly an easy way to get a result, but it will give you a different shape than shelling.

Shelling uses an offset calculation, which creates a shape that has the same thickness everywhere.

The scaling result will create a shape that has a varying thickness to it, except in a few special cases like for a circle or a sphere.

Here is a bit of an exaggerated example to illustrate.

Say you have this shape:



If you use an Offset on it, it will create a shape with a constant thickness:



Notice how the proportions of the shape have changed in the offset? It is not just a scaled copy of the original.

Scaling only would do something like this:




For shapes that are absolutely symmetrical about a center point like a sphere or circle, then that is a special case where scaling and offsetting are equivalent, but for the general case they are not the same thing.

- Michael

Yes but in this particular 4 / symetrics gem I believe that work ;)

Hi Pilou,

> Yes but in this particular 4 / symetrics gem I believe that work ;)

Actually no, I don't think so because there are different shaped facets in the gem, which are at varying angles to each other, each face is not of the same exact shape at the same angle from the center point.

For example, here is again the image that I posted earlier that shows what an offset of this shape should look like:



Notice how the offset result should have a vertex structure where there are 3 different vertices where pieces meet in the center?

If it was equivalent for scale and offset, it should have just a single vertex where the offset results meet up.

- Michael

Hi Marco,

> btw. are there any plans for the future to support the DXF-format natively?

Yes, I would like to support DXF and possibly DWG as well. But they are not really that easy of a format to work with, it may be a while before I will be able to get to that.

- Michael

So I must make a big zoom on these crossing facets :)
Homothety seems keep the same variable angle
I don't see problem
I use my previous post file
Maybe Scale 3D is different than Offset?

Hi Pilou,

you wrote:
> I don't see problem

If you take a look at my image above that shows what the offset should look like, you can see that although those 3 vertices in the middle are distinct, they are not terribly far apart from one another, they are fairly close together.

So at a smaller distance, the error will be kind of hard to tell just by looking at the result, you would need to measure distances between shapes instead of just looking at them to be able to detect the difference.


> Maybe Scale 3D is different than Offset?

Yes - Scale3D is definitely different than Offset, that's what I was trying to show with the illustrations here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1939.20

Only in special cases like a regular polygon or a circle/sphere are they the same. This is not one of those cases - it is close but not quite.

- Michael