I've had some pretty good luck lately generating some simple parts for
printing on Shapeways. I've settled into a pretty good work-flow using
Blender's mesh modifier operations, and some additional post-processing in
meshlab. The feature sizes on these example parts use the
guidelines for minimum wall-thickness and aspect ratio.
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Isogrid Cylinder |
I used the Array modifier to replicate an
isogrid in 2-D, and then used the Curve deformation modifier to wrap that into a cylinder. No post processing in meshlab on this one.
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Octet Truss Cylinder |
For the
octet truss parts I generated 3D Arrays and then used the Curve deformation modifier, or unioned them with flat panels.
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Octet Truss with Panels |
For this part with panels, I used meshlab's Ball Pivoting surface reconstruction algorithm to get nice fillets between the spars of the truss and the surface of the panel on each side. This process also adds a little extra "meat" at the joints of the space frame. A few iterations of Gaussian smoothing does away with any ugly faceting with the large triangular faces that the Ball Pivoting algorithm might add.
Update: I tried out the
cloud.netfabb.com STL fixing service. It seems to work automagically. They also have a
basic version of their software that is free (but not Free).
Update: Some nice isogrid parts, FDM ABS by
Fabbr.
Close-up showing the I-beam cross-section.
The Pointwise blog has an interesting article on a plugin that they are working on for 3D printing grids.
ReplyDeleteVery similar to the way I generated the solids for the octet truss; union a bunch of cylinders. I ran into the same problems they had with Blender not giving me nice manifold meshes at the intersections of the cylinders.
Hey anyway i could get the blender file for the octet truss you made?
ReplyDeleteSure, I haven't used Blender for this sort of thing in a while, but I'll see if I can dig them up.
DeleteI found that BRLCAD can create manifold meshes with lots of Boolean ops more reliably than Blender (example scripts linked from this post). There may be a smarter way to use Blender, but I haven't had the time to figure it out.