Hi,

Beginner here, so please forgive any obvious mistakes. I am trying to design a small object for 3D printing.





I have worked with solids all the way osing boolean commands with other solids to cut away until I reached this shape. There are no problems with faces, and the whole thing reports as a solid. However, when I export as STL and open in slicer or meshmixer, the object has tiny thin walls, inside and outside. I have tried to solidify the object but to no avail. It prints, but the outer walls are so thin the printer fails with certain spots. Also, it seems as though the rounded cylinder shape added into the center is actually truly solid in the stl.

Again, pardon my ignorance, but does anyone of you have any helpful pointers on where to go next?

Post here your 3dm file! ;) If it's a secret one post it directly to Michael...moi@moi3d.com

OK. Here is the file.

Your object seems perfect! :)
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So seems your Print programs don't know how to fill the internal part...have you try to scale your original?

That is interesting. I used the latest Anycubic photon slicer. I have since redone the piece in meshmixer using make solid and I think it behaves better now. Good to know it is not a MOI issue.

Hi MA, I think you might run into some problems with slicers considering your object to have areas of self-intersection because the cylinder and inner wall basically touch or graze very close to each other in these areas here:



It would probably be good to have a little bit of spacing here:



Basically when the slicer goes to slice your STL file in order to form proper regions the slices need to make well formed intersections with a plane which means the intersections result in closed loops. When 2 different surface areas are very closely pinched together it can make it hard to get a clean intersection result at those areas and that can potentially mess things up.

So for 3D printing, try to avoid making really thin sharp needle type things like this:



- Michael

The eyes' master! ;)

But the meshmixer shows also default on around the external skin ?

Hi Pilou, probably the self-intersecting or nearly-self-intersecting areas will also confuse meshmixer as well.

- Michael