Hi Paolo,

Thanks for that info, much appreciated.

At present I'm bringing the STL in via the Voxel Room> Import> Merge Object, then I scale it up by 10.
I then hit Enter for the Scale & click the Apply button, I also get a message about the Merge & click Yes to that too.
Going by what you've said it sounds like I'm doing it right.
Here's a screen capture of what I'm getting once it's first loaded, but without anything other than the Scale applied.

So I guess my next question would be "What's the better option?"...Command> Smooth All or Commands> Inc. Res??

regard Colin

Hi Colin, you also may want to scale it up by 10 times in MoI first, rather than doing it after the import into the Voxel Room.

Possibly the conversion to voxels (voxels are little boxes similar to a bitmap pixel, it stands for "volume pixel") is happening during the initial import step and when you scale up, you are scaling the already voxelized result up.

So it's kind of similar to how you can get visible jaggies to appear when you try to scale up a small bitmap to a larger size.


For OBJ export, there is a scale factor that you can have applied to your export automatically by setting the option in MoI under Options > Import/Export > OBJ options > Scale factor. That may be useful for this case.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the OBJ info, those settings at least give me a start point.
And as you've suggested, I've just finished posting my STL files over at 3D-Coat Forum to see if someone can offer their advice.

So wondering if I would I keep the "Weld Vertices" ticked ON when doing the OBJ Export from MoI in these cases?

regards Colin

Hi Colin,

> So wondering if I would I keep the "Weld Vertices" ticked
> ON when doing the OBJ Export from MoI in these cases?

Probably it will make no difference - that means where there are 2 polygons from different surfaces that touch one another, whether there will be a single 3D vertex that they share in common ("welded"), or whether each polygon will have its own separate vertices but they are stacked up on top of each other in the same location.

Probably you would want it welded if you were going to be mushing the polygon data itself around, but if you are doing voxel editing you are not doing that, the polygons are converted into voxels when you bring them in and then you are working a big soup of voxel information instead of polygon information after that.

An "unwelded" OBJ file does have a slightly less complicated structure to it though, so unchecking weld is something that you can try if a program just seems to be choking on trying to figure out how to read the file at all. I think that particular thing is not too likely to be an issue here though.

- Michael

For great results in 3D Coat consider this version if you are organised for it.

3D Coat 64bit (or 32bit) Cuda/DX

Brian