Adjusting the thickness of single surface solid import

Hi
I tried to use the split command and the trim command in the Eval version of Rhino5 on a stl file I imported of a vase I had scaled up resulting in overly thick walls. Is this the right way to go and is it possible in the Eval version?

Anything that is possible in the commercial version is also possible in the eval version, there is no difference in functionality.

However, your imported STL is a mesh object, Split and Trim will not work on mesh objects, you must use MeshSplit and MeshTrim. I’m not sure what you want to do, if you are trying to thin the walls, I would have a tendency to just delete the entire inner wall of the vase and use OffsetMesh to offset the outer wall to the inside with the thickness you want. Keep in mind however that working with meshes is not Rhino’s strong point.

HTH, --Mitch

Thanks. Unfortunately DeleteMeshFaces should be singular! My inner vase face has a million mesh faces and so deleting each face sequestially by typing this command a million times is not really practical. Flower pots and vases are popular and so others are likely to be doing this kind of thing. I hope Rhino 6 has a solution if Rhino4 doesnt. Didnt get as far as MeshOffset for this reason. Please tell me if there is a way to delete all the connected faces in one go raher than one at a time.

I have a 50mm model of a vase. I am scaling this up by 10 times at least but do not want the walls to scale by 10 times as this is ugly and uses too much material ie too expensive to print.

Hello- try the ExtractConnectedmeshFaces command - does that do you any good?

-Pascal

Thanks. I tried ExtractConnectedmeshFaces but it seems it extracts only meshes that adjoin each other directly.

What I have done so far is import the stl vase and trim off the top edge of it. This leaves two curved surfaces that are separated by a small gap. Your advice is to delete one of these surfaces but I cannot select it in one go to delete as it is made up of million meshes.

ExtractConnectedmeshFaces allows me to delete a handful of meshes in one go but still leaves me with most of the surface I am trying to delete. Given Rhin has been going since 1980 I am puzzled this isnt easily done!

Hi,

Keep in mind Rhino is a NURBS modeler, not a mesh modeler.

I’m not sure how the inner and outer vase walls are connected, but you might want to try ExtractMeshPart to separate the mesh faces that are not welded.

Try SplitDisjointMesh on the trimmed object. Does that do anything you want?

-Pascal

Thanks but this SplitDisjointMesh didnt work and had no noticeable effect. I think the mesh is continuous but I am having trouble selecting one suface of the rtimmed vase. I think this is my mistake as the vase I am cutting has an unusual fractal pattern so that there is only one surface. I mistakenly thought there were two surfaces. The vase is the STL from this link:

I wanted to scale up the vase say 10 times keeping the thickness the same but think this is harder than I initially thought.

Hi, think I did it. USed meshsplit to cut off top of the vase and then exploded it to two surfaces and used mesh offset to get a new wall