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eliemichel / MapsModelsImporter

A Blender add-on to import models from google maps
https://blog.exppad.com/article/importing-actual-3d-models-from-google-maps
GNU General Public License v3.0
2.47k stars 304 forks source link

Cleaning up/preparing mesh for 3D printing #8

Open alastaira opened 5 years ago

alastaira commented 5 years ago

Thanks for this brilliant script - it works a charm to get data of the area surrounding my house into Blender. What I'd now like to do is to 3D print a "terrain tile" of that area, and I wondered if anyone else had developed a good workflow for what I imagine is that fairly common use-case?

I've tried to fix holes in the geometry, make it manifold, remove duplicate vertices etc. in Blender itself, and in tools like MeshLab or MeshMixer, and while I can eventually get a model that looks ok in Cura (my slicer of choice), it simply does not print correctly at all - as if the features have been separated onto separate layers from the terrain, and it's only attempting to print one of the feature layers?

Grateful for any advice or experience from anyone who's used the data successfully for this purpose.

eliemichel commented 5 years ago

I haven't tried so, but regarding how dirty the raw geometry used by Google is I fear you'll have to go for a retopology by hand. There are good workflows for that in Blender. Anyway, if you find something keep us up to date, cleaned geometry might be useful beyond the sole purpose of 3D printing!

flxpx commented 4 years ago

I don't know how to achive this in blender yet, sorry.

But! There is quite a good workflow available in Cinema4D as explained in this tutorial about 3D scanning: https://youtu.be/VRfytVKkNQw?t=1926 It can be applied to the google maps data as well.

So if you have C4D (R20 and newer) available, give it a shot.

eliemichel commented 4 years ago

There is such a voxel-based remeshing feature in Blender 2.82: remesh

alastaira commented 4 years ago

Oooh, that is exciting - thanks! Just having an experiment with it - although initial tests seem to show it actually generating more holes than fixing them - think it might require some fine tuning of the voxel size and adaptivity, but definitely worth investing some time in - thanks for point it out :)

i2chris commented 4 years ago

Did you ever manage to fix your meshes? I've played around with Blenders remeshing with no luck. Surely there must be something simple around to do this easily?

alastaira commented 4 years ago

Not with any kind of repeatable automated process, no. I spent ages manually fixing up individual problems, only to then decide that I wanted the terrain at a different level of resolution so couldn't use what I'd done. I too feel like it shouldn't be impossible to script (Blender can be scripted, after all) using a ready-made mesh retopology function, but haven't had chance to look at it again recently.