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making a shell of a not too complex shape
david_bijl
Member Posts: 2 ✭
Hello all,
I recently got into candle making and wanted to 3d print a mold for it. While browsing for ideas I came across some funny Easter eggs with moustaches and hats so I decided to recreate it in a way that I can make a candle out of it. That's how I got my model. Then I did the next logical step: creating the mold itself I wanted to reduce material and time while printing as much as possible so I wanted a mold where the mold would be the same shape as my model while being the same thickness everywhere. For that I used the thicken tool but that only worked up to 3.45mm after which it just gives an error. I couldn't get any other tool to get me a better result. I would also like to make more of such molds in the future so a quick and easy solution would be optimal.
I have already tried blender but that gave back a very ugly model (in picture). I have also downloaded Rhino CAD and OpenSCAD to hopefully solve the issue but I don't really want to learn 2 cads from scratch for this.
I hope that someone has a good solution for this (I've been looking for like 8 hours now)
Kind regards,
Efflux
Comments
If you're using an FDM printer leave it chunky and just tweak the infill settings. If it's a resin printer where you can't do that then you're on track with using thicken, shell etc. Thicken, Shell, and Offset Surface are all doing similar things in the background, so they will all fail in the same way. I suspect it's because they are trying to offset your oddly shaped surface and 3.45 is when the offset intersects itself. My suggestion for a general workflow is to make a simplified mold cavity, shell it, then subtract the actual egg from that. That way the offset will be something simple, and only the inner face of the mold will have the full detail.
Independent Onshape Consultant | Industrial Designer
Its not clear what you want to do that you need to change the step files… .You could just boolean the step files together and make edits as you need for the candle mold and then boolean subtract the new object from a mold object. I try to avoid recreating things that are already modeled. Once done you can just export the files your slicer needs