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3D print file becomes nonplanar and I can't fix it!! Please help an idiot!
brent_steward
Member Posts: 2 ✭
I am so frustrated by this and can't understand it. It is a little hard to explain. I'll try to put in a screenshot and link to the file to explain. I have a part on which I would like to emboss a logo. I have a PDF file which I then converted to DXF and imported. I had to transform it down in size so it would fit the part. Somehow I could not shrink it without first extruding it into a shape. (My ignorance, I assume). I then built sketches and the part with the face of that extrusion being the sketch plane. That all seems to work OK, but the logo becomes pixelated/triangulated. When I export to a STEP or STL file to print, that face of the object is nonplanar. That causes a major issue when trying to print. The layers aren't parallel and it prints poorly.
Things I have tried to do to fix it….
I put an offset plane and did a "slice" to basically take off a layer and hopefully make it planar. Didn't help.
In my slicer, I did basically the same thing, cutting a couple mm off the top. It does not help.
I also selected the face of the logo and did another extrusion up to the face of the remainder of the part. Also did not help.
What am I doing wrong? I am just extremely frustrated. I don't understand how this part face is becoming somehow nonplanar, and I assume it has something to do with the DXF file and shrinking that down, but no clue how to correct it.
I tried to link the document above and then the screenshot below is what it looks like when rendered in the slicer, or even in OnShape, for that matter.
Comments
Looking at your model it seems like all of your faces are planar. The screenshot above looks like the logo is right on top of the other surface so you're seeing that glitchy looking artifact. Assuming you're trying to do it as a multi-color print you can use the Boolean feature to cut the letters out of the black part so they don't overlap (you can also do this directly in some slicers if you prefer).
As a DFM note, the small letters are only .45mm wide, which is about 1 line width of a typical FDM printer, and I wonder if legibility will be a challenge once printed.
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Is this what you mean by non planar? Not really sure what the issue is, but when you export this your STL files would overlap geometry. not sure if the slicer would handle this, haven't tested it.
Slicers should be fine with overlapping geometry (bugs notwithstanding). In the screenshot, I see a bunch of z-fighting (that arrangement of triangles that lie in the same plane, so your GPU has to decide more or less randomly which to render). I don't see it in Onshape.
AFAICT, though, the part exports fine…