Anybody here proficient with Meshmixer?

[RobotChicken]

I have spent about a week trying to figure this out to no avail. When I export a model with all the faces joined (so the model is a solid) the vertices are messed up and an .stl export looks awful. When I export with all the faces unjoined (all separate objects) then the model has all the vertices correct in Meshmixer, except of course it's no good having all the faces separate. They need to be joined together at the edges. I cannot figure out a way to do this in 123D Design, and whenever I try welding or joining edges in Meshmixer the faces get distorted and corrupted - it won't leave the faces as the are and simply join the adjacent edges. I would love to get a little bit of mentoring on how to fix this issue. (Then you guys can have .stl downloads of Mk VI armor in the File Archive!)

 

[peterthethinker]

PM me the file Link and Ill take a look today ! . and post the fix here.

have you tried to dump the file in to Netfabb on the MS azure server ?

 

[Lazarus215]

In my experience, you really have 2 options...

1. Use the Make Solid command.
- Import object
- Open the EDIT tab on the left
- Select MAKE SOLID
- in the new option panel, select the SOLID TYPE (Default says FAST) Use Sharp Edge Preserve
- Move Solid Accuracy and Mesh Density up or down as you see fit. THESE WILL DRASTICALLY INCREASE THE NUMBER OF TRIANGLES!!!!
- To finish or check work, click the UPDATE button on the bottom of the panel
- To reduce number of triangles, click the SELECT tab on the left.
- Press CTRL and A
- in option panel, go to EDIT -> REDUCE
- I like to do reduce by percentage (Default) and Reduce type of Sharp Edge Preserve.
- Use the slider to select the percentage of triangles to be reduced by. THIS WILL AUTO UPDATE THE MODEL, DO NOT HIT ACCEPT UNTIL YOU ARE SATISFIED (Otherwise it can screw up the model and further attempts to reduce the Mesh)
(This method can result in extra triangles in odd orientations.)

Option 2.
- ANALYSIS
- INSPECTOR
- Hole Fill: Minimal, Small Thresh = 0.001
- Auto Repair all
(This method MAY cause a loss in mesh accuracy)

 

[RobotChicken]

Thanks - I had played around with the Make Solid option but the model always looks horrible afterwards (I had been using the default Fast type). Accurate and Sharp Edge Preserve also destroy the model, and increasing the Solid Accuracy and Mesh Density settings consistently crashes the application (wonderful programming by the developers). Using the second option (Hole Fill) also destroys the model with inverted faces and sharp edges getting rounded off. I finally managed to get the Make Solid to finish without crashing and this is how it looks with Solid Accuracy at maximum (not very accurate!):

 

[kaween]

.... consistently crashes the application (wonderful programming by the developers) ...

Don't get me wrong on this but I'm nearly relieved to read that, as I'd begun to think "it's just me". I've been experimenting with Meshmixer these last 2 week too trying to get some other project to look better and it involved 3D extruded texts. Small texts no issues. More complex stuff ? Crashes galore.

In the end I got the result I needed by using a combination of Free Cad, Cubify Design and Blender. Talk about taking the long route.

I'm no expert, not by far, but if you get me your file I will try and see if I can make heads'n tails from it too.

 

[RobotChicken]

Thanks but I think I'm finally getting somewhere with my CAD software's settings for .stl export: