Add thickness to a surface for 3d-printing

Hello everyone,
This might be a familiar issue to many of you but I could not find an answer for it in previous discussions (might be me not being a good researcher). I have built a surface in grasshopper and want to offset it so I can loft the surfaces, make it solid and 3d print it. I have built the original surface (red in the image) with loft and when I offset it, in the new surface (green in the image) I get self intersections in some corners that is a problem. Is there any way that I can trim out these self-intersections and clean it up for printing?

Thanks in advance for your help

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mohammad Askarzadeh on December 8, 2016 at 8:35am

Thanks Toms for your response. Solid modellers are very tempting! If I can export my surface from Rhino to catia or solidworks that is a game changer!

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on December 8, 2016 at 8:43am

Use STEP214 and talk to the Master (CATIA)

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on December 8, 2016 at 9:19am

Master eh? then maybe I should ask some assistance for rebuilding some ex A class surfaces related with an ex Paralevel thingy (blame a collection of unfortunate moments > not my fault officer).

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on December 8, 2016 at 12:21pm

You could use the Cocoon plugin and use the original surface as an input! It's fairly straight forward to use but you may have to play with the settings to get the result you want.

Cocoon

This creates a mesh and you can refine it to get a good one for 3d printing. Since you will probably need to export a mesh for the 3d printing, using Cocoon to create a mesh in the first place is OK.

Permalink Reply by Laurent DELRIEU on December 8, 2016 at 1:02pm

You could use Meshmixer (free), you first transform your surface to a mesh. You save as obj or stl. Import in MeshMixer, Ctrl +A to select your object, Edit, then Offset with the sign +/- you want. Click on Connected and you will have a solid.

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on December 8, 2016 at 1:28pm

Has Meshmixer improved much since Autodesk bought it? I tried it a while ago to see how it could handle Mesh Booleans but it was a bit flaky.

Permalink Reply by Laurent DELRIEU on December 8, 2016 at 2:14pm

I never use it for real purpose, just to answer to some questions. It has some useful utilities, hole in solid to allow the flow of powder. It remesh quite well. I began to use it to suppress points inside mesh in order to be able to flatten strips. I ended in doing that with my own grasshopper C#. Thats all I can say.

Permalink Reply by Mohammad Askarzadeh on December 8, 2016 at 4:30pm

Hello Laurant, I am in fact a meshmixer user, I used to use this program to remove the bugs and make 3dsmax nurbs solid before printing, but never knew that this is a possibility. Thank you for your note and detailed explanation, I will let you know how it works!

Permalink Reply by Mohammad Askarzadeh on December 11, 2016 at 11:26am

Hello Laurent, thanks again for your suggestion. I tried meshmixer, it should be a good solution for my issue, but the surface that I get is not very clean even with the maximum accuracy, it is ripped off where the self intersections are. Do you know if there is any way of getting a better result out of this?

Permalink Reply by Laurent DELRIEU on December 11, 2016 at 12:17pm

I never 3d print but I am quite sure that there are tools on 3dprint webservice (shapeways, sculpteo ... )

I have done some offset for mesh wich work quite well for solid mesh

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/video/offset-of-a-mesh-without-self-in...

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/offset-mesh-problems-with...

You have not a solid mesh but if the free edges are on a plane perpandicular to Z il could be used.

If you want to send me your file I can look at it.

Permalink Reply by Laurent DELRIEU on December 11, 2016 at 3:06pm

It could also be possible to use offset from clipper or Bowerbird in order to have interior curve and then loft them or recreate a mesh in the same way you are making the outside.

Permalink Reply by Mohammad Askarzadeh on December 8, 2016 at 4:25pm

Thank you Martyn, this looks attractive, have not used it before. I am going to try it and will let you know how it works, Thanks again!

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