Good morning wonderful Rhino folks!
I am having difficulty in creating a bumpy surface on an ornament for some friends to be 3d printed. I’ve attached the file as well as the image as a reference. I want to create the same bumpy pattern of 1/8” spheres just barely on top of the surface. There is text I will be using which is 1/32 (.03125) so the spheres need to be a little smaller, though I could increase the height of the text to 1/16”. The reason is the average 3D print never has a good surface, but adding detail like this pattern hides the imperfections.
Create a displacement texture (white = up, black = down, greys in between = transition between up/down) similar to the below and apply it to your object. Set the object’s mesh to a high tessellation, so as much detail as you desire will be captured. Extract the render mesh for 3D printing. As @laurent_delrieu points out, remove the white in between your spheres. See below not for use, only for illustrative purposes.
The first is the one @laurent_delrieu suggested, it involves a displacement pattern mapped on an object, then you export this geometry to your usual slicer. The problem with this is that you need to define the mapping, and is easy only on cylindrical or planar surfaces. As soon as you depart from such simple cases, you’ll need to define UV mapping so that your pattern is applied correctly and that raises the difficulty significantly.
The other option is to use built-in features of slicers to do that, I know that Cura and Bambu Studio can do that or use “fuzzy skin” texturing used to hide defects too but is based on random noise, so no need to define your image/surface mapping.
There is a third option (Grasshopper) that I won’t elaborate since I assume you’re not going to dig into that.
