Error in Exported STL File

MikeDobrick

Good Morning. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

I'm a design engineer with 15+ years of CAD Experience starting in Pro/E and progressing through SW and Inventor. So, I was asked to help a friends son doing an 8th Grade Science project. He's going to do a 3D print of a Bohr Model of an Argon atom. I chose Onshape do to the free trial, easy model sharing, and relative power of the software without the overhead of high end hardware. It's working brilliantly, and he's learning how to model as fast as I can explain it to him!

I've created a model of the Atom that I had hoped to export to an STL file for a test print. I have a number of different parts within a single Part Studio. When exported from the part studio (or an assembly), any place that has an interference between two parts is NOT exported in the STL File. While not explicitly a problem in recreating the geometry, when the slicer of my 3D printer encounters this lack of solid area it leaves a void and tries to fill it in with support material. Again, not a huge ordeal, but the interface between the two areas with solid geometry leaves a line contact, and I feel that it will result in a weak point of the print. Not something I want to happen to this young man that is intending to turn this in for a grade in his science class.

I have some screenshots to share (as well as the models obviously) if anyone needs some better explanation.

Anyone else encountered this problem, and have any sort of work around (aside from not making interfering parts)?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Mike Dobrick
mike.dobrick@gmail.com

MikeDobrick

So the topic is showing "answered" with one comment. I can't see the response on this end. No matter which way I try to view the topic. *edit*....so it appears that has been fixed.....weird.....anyway.....

We've moved forward with making all the separate parts into a single part, and that fixed the issue slightly, however the model is less "appealing" visually do to the fact that I can't control the appearance of an individual surface or feature, but only as a part in whole. Am I missing something in the appearance control of my parts?

Jake_Rosenfeld

Hi Mike,

I'm glad you got your 3d printing situation worked out. We currently do not support face or feature coloring, but if you go vote for those improvement requests it will help us prioritize them for you and you will be notified when they are completed.

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/1306/color-by-feature
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/1293/coloring-faces

Jake

owen_sparks

MikeDobrick said:

...however the model is less "appealing" visually do to the fact that I can't control the appearance of an individual surface or feature, but only as a part in whole. Am I missing something in the appearance control of my parts?

It's only a bodge until something better is developed but I've taken to "kinda" colouring individual faces by extruding the face in question by 0.001mm as a new part and then changing the colour for that part. 

If dimensions are not critical then extrude away from the part.  If they are critical then it can be extruded "into" the part, and then boolean subtracted from it to prevent the viewer showing the interference split colours pattern and give the same bounding dimensions.

Aesthetically pretty but hopefully temporary.

Cheers,

Owen S.