I don’t have much experience working with meshes and exporting to sol for 3D printing.
I just exported a fairly straight model, as in all right angles. I am getting an undulated surface. I have tried both Ascii & Binary (not sure of the difference). Set the tolerance to 0.001, not sure if this is the cause.
I did a little test. I created a cylinder of 10 mm dia. and 15 mm high, then used the command “Mesh” and selected the cylinder to convert. I never had to give a tolerance, but was presented with a slider to select more or fewer polygons. I set it about midway, and the result was a mesh with perfectly rectangular polygons on the side and a cluster of triangular polygons on top and bottom. The edges are perfectly square:
Randy, I seem to have missed the main theme of your question, and I assumed I was looking at your mesh conversion rather than an STL export. I have successfully printed some of my Rhino designs, and always converted the polysurface to a mesh first, then exported as STL. I had these stl’s printed by Shapeways.com, who use a powder fusion process, and the results have been consistently good, sharp edges all around (or at least as sharp as this process allows).
Hi @maxz , yes that was what i was wondering. Should I convert to mesh first then export as STL. I will do more tests tomorrow when back in the office. Tot zeins.
@Zsimon thanks for the screen shots and the advice, a presto.
