Is it possible to shrinkwrap offset build a thickness to the inside?

Is it possible to shrinkrwap offset build a thickness to the inside?

Now it builds thickness to both sides and I would like to build the thickness of my 3d print to the inside.

I`m looking the way to fast convert complicated zero thickness polysurfaces for 3d printing and give some thickness to inside with maintaining exterior shape. Is that possible?

Doing OffsetSrf will give me many errors to fix and I know from f.e. MeshMixer that voxelization offset is a great answer for self intersection errors during shelling/hollowing/offseting to inside.

So if its not possible right now to do that in Shrinkwrap then please make it happen in future. For now I`m forced to use MeshMixer for that which is half dead.

Pufferfish plugin in Grasshopper can offset mesh to a solid mesh. But yes it would be nice if shrinkwrap could pick an offset direction.

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Thanks. Problem with Grasshopper is a mesh size and it limits you to smaller things. I would like to push car bumper like that with preserving details. I do it with MeshMixer right now but I worry that I will lost access to that software. It also force me to close all meshes and cut opening after hollowing what is also time consuming. Shrinkwrap is close to that but needs only pushing whole mesh to inside. So I think it`s not complicated wish. Cheers!!

How Pufferfish handle hard edges to inside? Will create self intersection errors?

Upload an example of your mesh.

I can’t upload meshes (NDA). To fake complexity like this I would need to sit two weeks. I have samples but much simpler. if I will upload here not so complex parts then I will hear that it is possible to do OffsetSrf over that quick. I can`t publish those complex parts because they belong to my clients.

Shrinkwrap with offset and subtract it from your model.

If you can’t hget it to work, post your file or a simplified example.

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Thanks. Interesting. But shrinkwrap produce bigger mesh and it would be needed to extend every surface in the object to have intersection to substract. Am I right?

How do you mean?

Bigger = heavier = more vertices?


You can’t slice shrinwrap mesh with the surface source because source is shorter because shinkwrap produces mesh around the surface. I`ve meant that shrikwrap output is bigger in size.

Are you using the inflate option?


Even without inflate mesh is bigger than the surface. It would be also great feature in Shrinkwrap to not have so much round corners. Resolution should square it up. But for now it is rounder, bigger and not possible to push inside. So for me useless.

It would help if you could post some geometry.

Thanks. I will try to find some simpler and we will fake that is more complex :wink:

Else try in Blender with the Solidify modifier.

@ftzuk @martinsiegrist


test_bumper.3dm (1.5 MB)

But this is few hour work only, please pretend that is very complicated one. I would like to 3d print that. Show me the way pls. I would like to have it thick 3mm and have as much exterior smoothness as possible without jagged polygons after 3d print.

Shrinkwrap dont use volumetric offset and generate errors even with so simple case. Much complex case will produce nightmare meshes. I had best result with volumetric offsets always and I had a lot expectations from Shrinkwrap but as I said without more squarish look and pushing it inside I can`t use it in my work.

test_bumper_meshed.zip (19.9 MB)

You can see how well did it 3dcoat. 3dcoat pushed it to the inside and also made it in volumetric style (same as Shrinkwrap) so it will work also with more complicated meshes. I sliced it to upload 20MB but with a higher resolution.

Please Rhino team make it possible to push it inside not to force me to go to other software…

have you tried the thickening object modifier?
Then take it with ExtractRenderMesh and Shrinkwrap it.
It can work on some cases, but you may need to bring your model to a file with higher resolution units, like milimeters. I don’t have any technical argument, but for me the thickening modifier doesn’t produce good results with many decimals (imo 0.05 like I used, it’s better than 0.0005)

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