3D printing of solid walled objects costs much more than say, filigree, mesh or screen forms. Many CAD programs, such as Rhino, display files as wireframes and mesh by default and can be rendered to look solid. Please excuse my still limited knowledge here.

Can anyone help me to print objects that are actually mesh or equivalent objects? For instance, say I have created a sphere using Moi, or Rhino. I would like to convert said 3D sphere file so that it will actually print a mesh walled sphere.

Actually, I have more complex files already made (picture frames, stylized block etc.) but want to convert the solid planes of these objects to filigree, mesh, wire or other "open architecture" so that they will print same. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks.

Brent

Hi Brent, to get a wire-like 3D print you'll need to make a solid that has the wires modeled as little tubes basically. For it to print it has to have thickness, the printer does not know how to process an infinitely thin wire only.

One tool that can make it easy to create that kind of pattern is TopMod: http://code.google.com/p/topmod/ - it processes polygon mesh objects (objects made up of polygonal facets, you can generate those from MoI by saving to a polygon mesh format like OBJ, or STL) and it has various options for mutating the mesh I think including ways of hollowing out the inside of polygons and making thick areas around the polygon edges. Do a Google image search for topmod to see some results.

That's probably the easiest way to make a kind of open space wireframe like object that's actually a 3D solid with thickness that can print.

Another possibility is to actually model the wires as little tube like objects that have a small amount of thickness to them. In MoI v3 there is a new Flow command which can help to map a 2D pattern onto a 3D surface and that can be a good way to approach putting some kind of structure onto a sphere, see this example here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4795.10

- Michael

Hi Michael,

This is awesome. I'm on it. Thanks so much!

-Brent