Creating an STL from a group of meshes

I actually work with Rhinogold, but with certain things it shouldn’t differ much from Rhinocerus. I already asked on the Rhinogold forum, but it was suggested I asked around on this forum as well. More heads and all that…

Here’s the thing. I want to make a rendering from some jewelry I made with Rhinogold, but I don’t have a dedicated render program for it. However I have Art Cam as well and it comes with an addon/plug-in called Keyshot so I can render my models. It’s a full program normally, but in Art Cam it is used as a plugin, so you can’t use Keyshot without Art Cam.

Art Cam unfortunately has distortion in their models which doesn’t matter much for manufacturing, but it bugs me when I render these models for display. So especially for rendering, I like Rhinogold. Yet I’m not willing to buy another render program when I have access to a very good one linked to Art Cam. So I import the models into Art Cam from Rhinogold and from Art Cam I export it to Keyshot.

Here’s where the problem arises. If the whole model (stones included) belongs to 1 assembly in Art Cam, Keyshot can’t distinguish the metal from the gems when it’s exported like that. That’s why I need to make a separate assembly/STL for the gems in Rhinogold. But when I have to make a separate STL for each and every gem in my model, that’s a lot of time and good mood lost.

I do wish to invest in a render program possibly in the near future (most likely Keyshot since I’m already familiar with it), but at this point in time, it’s not an investment I can fully justify.

So I hope there’s a solution for this particular problem of mine.

I appreciate any and all input you guys can give me.

  • Arek

You can Join meshes that do not touch into one mesh. So I can imagine that you join all the metal and all the gem meshes into two meshes, and export them to STL separately.

Hi Menno,

I tried it just now and it worked brilliantly.

Thank you very much.