I had an organically shaped object 3D scanned. The company scanned the inside surface and I created a solid from this. I can’t remember exactly what steps I took within Rhino to thicken the surface and create the solid. The scanned surface started as 12 MB. I know I reduced the mesh from 65000 or so, to about 20,000. The solid is over 900 MB, which makes rendering fairly slow. All boolean operations have failed. Immediately, I need to trim the top and get rid of the jagged edge, as seen in the first pic. The second pic shows how the individual surfaces are highlighted when the object is selected.
Ultimately, I’m designing a product that will be a liner to fit inside this cup. I will need to offset the inner surface and thicken that offset. I just don’t want to have to keep working with a 900 MB file. I still have the original scanned surface file, so anything can be redone.
What is the best way to either start over or reduce the file size of what I currently have? If I have to manipulate the mesh in a different software, I’m okay with that. If I can do it all efficiently in Rhino, all the better.
That’s a fairly simple shape. The best thing to do is to just model the surface you need to offset from from-scratch, using PointDeviation to check your tolerance to the initial scan. That file size and image looks like an auto-generated surface-from-mesh, or each mesh face was turned into a little surface. Neither are suitable for the basis of a production model.
You might try running Contour through the mesh. Rebuild the curves to smooth and decrease control point count. Then loft the surface. Adjust as the curves necessary - I like SoftEditCrv but there are lots of tools to do do this - then loft again.
Abraham,
I tried Contour then Loft. I used .010" distance between contours. I tried all different options for Loft and I would end up with some skewed surfaces between certain curves. I don’t have enough memory to loft the entire part in one shot, so I have to do 10-20 curves at a time. Here is what I’m running into. Should I have my contours farther apart, and try to do some smoothing later?
Basically what @JimCarruthers and @DiegoKrause are suggesting to you is true. Your model is fairly simple and you should be able to model it using a combination of curves and extrusions. If this presents a challenge you can use Contour to get a model that is close. When I use Contour I set a much wider spacing and add details later. But in the long run it would be much better to model in a more traditional way as you will increase your understanding of surfacing.
