I’ve created a mesh that I want to “offset” and then add drain holes in order to manufacture hollow. I’ve previously posted regarding this but for some reason Rhino seems to be working against me. It will be manufactured as a trophy style and I want to make the “3d,” cube and base hollow. Can we quickly go through the steps of how to make this mesh a wall for additively manufacturing?
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I would love to send you my file. I will send to you through hightail, is that ok?
Hi Nadia - the objects are not meshes - that is OK in itself, but just FYI. How much offset are you looking for? Are the smaller objects (text and pattern) meant to be part of the solid when you’re done?
-Thanks,
-Pascal
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@pascal, I intentionally sent it to you not as a mesh thinking their was a possibility that it could be edited still in its original form. We would like to keep all text and pattern elements in the solid. We also need to be able to preserve the color as we are working with a color printer. We have actually printed this solid with no issue but we would like to be able to print this hollow to safe on material. Perhaps just the '3d" and base would be hollow as I understand the rest could become quite fragile. Have I sufficiently expressed my wishes for this file?
we would like the offset to be .11-.15 if possible. we are working with a powder based printer and cant have the walls too thin or they would just fall apart.
more so in the end what I need is the details on how to achieve this end result.
Yep, I got that - it is a little messy, in this case, to clean up the offsets - stay tuned.
-Pascal
thank you so much @pascal. any feedback is greatly appreciated. I did take an introduction to rhino class but it was more design based. my intentions for rhino are to use for printing.
I’m assuming this is going on an Objet or a Zcorp machine?
In this case I would recommend making a lower fidelity interior shell rather than trying to “one-click” shell the whole thing as-is, because the smaller features will add more problems to the geometry than they are worth. That means wall thickness won’t be truly uniform throughout, but will be reasonably uniform with exception to those details.
If you want an “easy button” you might also want to look at doing a pass through a voxel-oriented program like 3DCoat to produce the interior shell, because otherwise you’ll be left with a lot of trimming work to do if you’re working with surface intersections.
As a freelancer, I’d be happy to help with doing this kind of work, until you get up to speed on the modeling yourself.