king joffrey, on 15 November 2014 - 01:07 AM, said:
I had to bring this thread back once again. I would like to just say that I have no idea how in God's name you got that Atlas model ready to print. No idea. From a 3d printing standpoint, it's such a horribly designed model. Vertices and faces overlapping, holes everywhere, hidden geometry, etc. Each time I feel like I'm getting somewhere, I run into a handful of problems, and have to scrap all my work and start over.
I've tried working on it on 3 occasions now, and put probably close to 15-20 hours of frustrating time into modeling, but I can't seem to get it to work. I've tried modeling in Sketchup, 3D Studio, and Meshmixer, and each time, I get a few hours in, and everything falls apart for one reason or another. I would like to think of myself as an advanced level 3d modeler, but I'm about to the stage of tearing my hair out. Any tips you can give would be extremely appreciated!!!
It is unfortunately as bad as you describe. I cleaned it up in 3D studio, and it literally just takes patience and having a proper workflow so there is continuous progress. Viewing the model as a whole will just get you frustrated to no end, break it up into workable chunks.
Here's roughly what I did:
-Break it apart into manageable groups
-Combine all the pieces, like little box details.
-weld all verticies with a 0.001 tolerance so those floating faces don't cause problems.
-remove all extra faces.
-cap all the open objects.
-then move onto the next group
At the end, boolean everything together making sure you have a backup.
I'm not sure there is an 'easy' way around it. Some slicers are smarter and might be able to print interpenetrating objects, but at the minimum they usually need to be water tight.
There is a lot more steps if you want to make it jointed, but I assume you only want a standard printable one for now.
Lastly, don't start over when flustered.. you need to continuous progress doing anything monotonous like this. So finish groups. make sure it's good, then move onto the next. Before you know it you'll be done!