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wolph / numpy-stl

Simple library to make working with STL files (and 3D objects in general) fast and easy.
http://numpy-stl.readthedocs.org/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Wall Thickness of Mesh Objects #180

Closed VeiledTee closed 1 year ago

VeiledTee commented 3 years ago

Hi!

First off thanks for developing this library, it's been really fun to tinker with while working on my undergrad thesis!

I'm having a bit of an issue though. When I save a mesh object to a .stl file and attempt to print the file (using Makerbot Print), half of the triangles are missing. After some googling (and attempting to open the same file in 3D Builder on Windows), I believe a possible cause for this could be that the wall thickness of the object in the .stl file isn't specified, making it difficult for these apps to interpret them, and leaving out triangles.

Do you have any insight on how the files are saved/if I can specify a wall thickness? I've tried both the ASCII and BINARY file save options and both yield the same result.

Let me know if I provide any info for further clarification!

Cheers

wolph commented 3 years ago

An STL file is a collection of triangles with 0 thickness, those triangles make up your model. If you need to have wall thickness, you need to have 2 surfaces with space between them.

You could try and copy all triangles and placing them in the model with an offset, but that is quite a tricky mathematical operation to do because you would need to shrink/enlarge the triangles in corners and everything.

stale[bot] commented 2 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.