Howdy,

My latest MoI creation: the NSA Spybot. :)



Available as a 3D print:
https://www.shapeways.com/model/1585639/nsa-spybot.html

All the best,

Metin

Nice!

Looks like that was designed in 1950's America or Cold War Russia.

That is a nice rendering. The surface texture and color are great. The eyes look like anodized aluminum.

Making that model simple and clean also made for a much better rendering, I think.

Thank you very much!

It has a certain retro cold war look indeed. :)

Because of some normal-based smoothing artifacts, I had to use a technique (Split Edge modifier in Blender) that caused some of the polygons to become faceted in stead of the illusion of being smooth / rounded. But as the 3D print also is faceted, it's OK.

Michael, I encountered a few open edges in my model, which made the model non-manifold and not suitable for 3D printing. I tried exporting with different poly counts and settings, but the problem areas remained. If you want to take a look at the scene, I can send it to you.

All the best,

Metin

""""I encountered a few open edges in my model, which made the model non-manifold and not suitable for 3D printing.""""""""""

undoubtedly the "text".............

Hi Metin,

> If you want to take a look at the scene, I can send it to you.

Yes, could you please e-mail it to me at moi@moi3d.com? Thanks.

- Michael

Burrman: Yup, the problem areas were in the text indeed. :)

Michael, I'll email the scene to you, thanks in advance for checking it out.

Hi Metin, thanks for sending the file.

A few n-gon areas are getting a really flat and thin triangle at their ends.

You can adjust some mesh settings to improve the mesh generation and avoid this – go to Options > General > “Edit .ini file” button, and set:

[Mesh Export]
<…>
CentroidTriangulation=y

It can also be a good idea to set a value for “Divide larger than” to force a more regular sized dicing up of the model which helps avoid having long skinny triangles extend very far in distance.

So for example I generated a file with centroid triangulation turned on, Output: Triangles only, Angle = 5, Divide larger than = 1, and there did not seem to be any problems in the output with those settings.

If you’re generating stuff for 3D printing output, something similar to those settings tends to help generate mesh results better suited for that.

- Michael

Very useful info, Michael, thank you very much!

Maybe the centroid triangulation would be useful as a checkbox option in the mesh export dialog? I'd never have found that without your mention of it.

All the best,

Metin

I'm honored: the NSA Spybot is featured on the great Technabob blog:

http://technabob.com/blog/2013/12/29/3d-printed-nsa-spybot/

Nice rendering -- the lights and mood work well.

Regarding the normals - there should not be an issue anymore. The OBJ importer got improved so that the normal data from MOI remains intact.

Also you can adjust the degree of the split edge modifier or mark certain edge as sharp and tell the modifier only to sharpen those.

Best

Claas

Vielen Dank, Claas!

<< Regarding the normals - there should not be an issue anymore. The OBJ importer got improved so that the normal data from MOI remains intact.>>

When did this happen? I have been watching Blender for a long time and haven't seen anything reported on this.