I am new to Rhino, and have a specific problem with a dxf file I imported from illustrator. It is the contour of an ornate, circular iron work, that looks sort of lace-like. I want to do a scale-model 3D print,but Illustrator’s live trace feature shows only the edges of the curved pieces of iron and I want to fill in between these edges before extruding. Otherwise, the printer cannot “see” edges so small. Here is an image of it:
and here is how Rhino sees it (detail):
Anyone know how I can fill in between the lines?
Thanks
PlanarSrf will give you a trimmed surface which could then be made into a solid at your desired thickness using ExtrudeSrf. The only thing to watch out for is that you have closed and planar boundary curves selected. Imported AI curves can often have gaps or overlaps that cause issues when modeling. In this case, I’d personally just trace one quarter of the design in Rhino using a PictureFrame as reference. Then Mirror and Join to get a perfect result.
Since it came in from DXF, it will probably have to be cleaned up and simplified so the curves are “clean”, with no overlaps, no gaps, no segments that double back over itself, and have only enough control points to accurately define the shape. That is likely to be a fair amount of work, particularly since your brand new to Rhino.
Once the curves are cleaned up, then using them as trimming curves to trim a planar surface should be relatively trivial.
Good luck
Thank you both. I tried various combinations but still have a weird problem. It seems the lines were fine and had no gaps etc but here’s what happened.
First I extruded the curves about .2"
Then I created a 4" square plane around the extrusion, and trimmed it, trimming out the parts I didn’t want, and wound up with an extrusion capped at one side with a plane.
Then I copied the plane and moved it straight up .2" to cap the other side. Below is what it looked like (both sides looked the same)
So I thought everything was cool and sent it as an STL to the slicing program, “Cura” for my printer (Ultimaker 2), but here’s what it looked like there.
Just like before!
I tried grouping the extrusion and the planes to no avail.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Since you didn’t mentioned joining the caps, I just want to make sure that you did
This thing is complicated enough that there may be little errors that you don’t notice. When you us What to get info about the shape before you convert it to stl, if the shape is a closed solid, that will be listed in the What report.
When you extrude a bunch of curves like that, you can select that the output will be a solid, which will make the caps and join everything up in one step if the curves are really accurate enough and don’t have gaps.
It’s helpful if you upload 3dm files with questions like this so people can really tell what the problems are.
Thanks Lowell, that solid option is helpful to know about. It seems I solved my own problem though; I realized that if Cura didn’t see the top and bottom, then it might not have been defined in Rhino as a real surface, just a plane, and sure enough, when I selected planes, it didn’t show any. So after much googling, I came across a tutorial that mentioned the command: “Surface from planar curves”, and that did it perfectly, first try. Then I just extruded that surface. The result, Cura sees this:
It’s going to be a coaster for my wife.
Many thanks, and Season’s Greetings,
Dan