For the past many years I have been making parts in rhino exporting as stl, and using shapeways to print my products for customers. Earlier this month Shapeways went out of business. Many of us selling on shapeways used their 3d-tools feature which would inspect the stl and tell the designer if the stl was withing the tolerances of the material being used to print an item. This would be in the form of a 3d heat map of the stl which you could spin around and if there were bad issues you would get a different heat model which was green and yellow areas to highlight critical failures.
So my question is there a way to do this in Rhino or is there a tool that can replace this.
Ideally I would enter in the material specs and the heat map would render using the stl
Thanks Jim do you know of any tutorials all I found was the help entry which isnt clear. I have the tolerances of a standard resin but not sure what it means for a target Im selecting the mesh I want to check?
You can use PointDeviation to check the model vs the mesh you want to export, and you can set the tolerances based on the limits of the printing process…you’ll have to figure that all for yourself, which makes me think…what did the old thing even do? Compare the STL to…what? The slicer output? What I’m saying you can do is check the accuracy of your STL mesh to your Rhino model, I have no idea what value comparing the STL mesh alone to something is supposed to have.
July 2 Shapeways filed Bankruptcy. They fired all the employee with zero notice, and all the sr execs and board members resigned. Before closing the doors all they did was disable the cart. There are rumors the netherlands factory staff are trying to start up a new company and get access to the equipment and site, however as a seller on their site the bankrupcy court in the us will be ongoing for many many months at the least.
I design parts for tabletop wargaming. The resins shapeways used had tolerances of .7 - 1mm thick. Sprues had to be 1mm and parts and details .7mm. They also had engraved/emboss tolerances of at least .05mm but the thickness or depth could set off alerts. Using 3d Craft cloud their specs are not as detailed.
Yes I am very familiar with meshmixer =) I use it when I have issues with rhino’s mesh boolean. granted 8 is much much more reliable than 6 was. The problem with meshmixer is when you use make solid on meshes with square edges it rounds them, and smooths out details even with sharpness and faces maxed out. Also most of the times I need this, the part is solid so no need to hollow out the part. Also the min thickness setting also smooths and looses detail. and I just need something to analyze the mesh to flag where its too thin or detail is too deep. that way I can go back to my seperate nurbs and redesign.
Here is what shapeways offered. this is the analysis of an stl of one of my parts.
Note they always warned the tool couldnt validate a sprue versus a part so it was all handlesd the same way. parts in red were too thin and predictions of possible failure and the designer would need to fix.
