I’ve used Rhino for years, but don’t work with meshes much. I have a mesh of a wheel rim which is not watertight–the inside of the mag spokes are surface shapes and not welded to the inside of the rim’s cylinder. Is there a methodology that I can apply to work with these incomplete meshes to make them watertight?
Hi RFM, Can you post your file as well?
Here’s a video Kyle did in the WIP for repairing meshes.
“Automatic” way. The result is useful depending on what exactly you use the mesh for…
Thank you
I will check it out - thank you.
front rim test.3dm (825.8 KB)
I have uploaded the .3dm file as Jafey requested. (I just missed that point the first time I read through the posts.
I see, it looks like the underside is missing. Do you know what is supposed to be modeled there?
basically, I am choosing objects & figuring out workflow for my new 3D printer. I found a Porsche 718 model that seemed detailed enough, so I obtained it then started by simply figuring out the front rim. I brought the mesh into Rhino to make the discovery that lead to this post. Right now all I want is to understand a methodology to work with meshes when I come across this problem.
I bulldozed through it by (1) converting the mesh to nurbs then (2) painstakingly identifying edges then (3) using a “Surface / Curve network” command to get to a polysurface–which was by no means perfect. Nonetheless, I got to something that I could export to the 3D printer. It was a long “hunt-and-peck” approach to the problem.
I realize that, depending on the quality of the initial mesh object, what I’m seeking to do may be easy or it may be difficult. I’m looking to be educated a bit more on how to solve this problem with meshes .
In this case the entire underside isn’t modeled. So this isn’t a few holes to fix, the transition of center of the hub to the spokes would need to be figured out.
I would use ShrinkWrap.
To get a somewhat useful result, I exploded the mesh, subdivided the main cylindric parts a few times and joined everything again into one mesh. The mesh has disjoint parts but it’s not a big deal.
I had to scale the rim by factor 10 to be able to use a low enough value for ShrinkWrap… Depending on the settings, the result is a single closed mesh 10 times larger than the original. You might want to work in another scale or downscale the mesh.
I think ShrinkWrap will save you a lot of time compared to trying to rebuild and join surfaces and meshes into printable models.
front rim test.3dm (8.2 MB)
I’ll give that a try - thanks! I’ll grab your file, but in the end I’ll also perform the steps myself so I can understand.
You are correct. I extracted all those edges then created a surface. I think I’m understanding by your observation that, in this case, there’s no “standard” methodology to address the issue.