Hello! I’m dealing with very organic shapes that I am creating molds for, particularly for silicone. Conventional software such as Solidworks does not offer enough features and customization, which is what I have used in the past for molds.
I am trying to create mold cavities that go into a larger mold body, that can be replaced if they are damaged.
The root of my problem is when it comes to splitting the two halves of a cube into separate bodies.
To give some back story on how it was created, I first created a 3D outline of the part that is being cast, and then inset it a bit so that it extends into the cavity of the mold. I also created curves to guide a sweep2 of a surface to split the mold with.
I then created a surface that slightly extends into the cavity of the mold. I used QuadRemesh to make it look nice and functional. The problem comes when I split it.
Once I split the block, (MeshBooleanSplit) which has the cavity in the center, it splits the cube in half but the internal cavity gets stuck to the bottom of the split, despite the parting line extending into the internal cavity. If I could solve this problem and just get it to work, that would be a huge help. All of the parts are mesh bodies. I have tried extruding the splitting surface a tiny amount, then doing a MeshBooleanDifference, but that did not work either. The software ended up running out of memory and crashing.
Am I doing this right? Is there any big flaws that you can see with my design process?
edit; I apologize but I cannot attach any files that contain this particular part in it. I am seeing if I can recreate the problem using a similar shape I eyeballed, so I have something to share.
Can you share the original file, the curve that for you divides the object, and the bounding box (rectangular block) you are using as the rough base? Then I can make a proposal for the mold.
You can share it via Google Drive or similar services.
This is an example of why Booleans are a bad strategy for what you want to accomplish.
This is what you want to do:
You want to split the box where it intersects the purple parting surface.
You want to split the red part where it intersects the purple parting surface. This will make the upper and lower cavity for your mold.
You want to split the parting surface (purple) where it intersects the box and also split it where it intersects the part in the center. After splitting you want to discard the pieces that are outside the box and inside the part. You will need two copies of the parting (one for the upper half of the mold and one for the lower).
Finally, you want to join the lower half of the box to one of the parting surfaces from step 3 and the lower half of the cavity from step 2. And you want to join the upper half of the box to other parting surface and the upperr half of the cavity.
I don’t work with meshes but I pretty sure Rhino has the tools to split one mesh with another mesh and to find the intersection of two meshes and to join two meshes where they contact each other after splitting.
Assuming all of the above works you should end up with two solid mold halves.
The advantage of doing this step by step is that if it does fail at some point you can figure out where and why it fails and do something about it. With booleans when they fail you are just left in the dark and booleans often fail.
He is probably making a mistake at some step. I have never had problems splitting meshes, SubD, or NURBS within the same mold. Rhino works very well for this kind of task.
