Looking for advice on printing a tricky part, a scan of seabed wreck.

[Davo]

Logically - I thought - if I set 100% support from the build plate only. It should have filled the space under the floating shell with solid support.
But it doesn't generate anything.

That works in Slic3r - but not perfectly. I'd like to be able to set 4 or 5 solid top shells.

[griffog]

Hmm, okay that's not going to work.

plan b :-)

Well I've managed to level it and align it with the build plate.
My cunning plan was to have it generate 100% support from the build plate.

But it doesn't believe a floating print needs support - so nothing happened :-)
Back to the drawing board.

Anyone know anything about s3d support settings ?

Logically - I thought - if I set 100% support from the build plate only. It should have filled the space under the floating shell with solid support.
But it doesn't generate anything.

Indeed that's what I tried, seemed logical that 100% support would fill in any voids between the build plate and the print but nope

[griffog]

I have an idea I'll try tonight : see if I can use it to cut a Solid cube.
Tell you tmrw.

Great, thanks.

[Marm]

This seems like it would be fairly easy to do in Sketchup. Import the STL, (You'll need a plugin for that), and clean up any loose junk hanging from underneath. Drop a line from each corner to a common rectangle beneath, forming your base plate. Then use Solid inspector (another plugin) to find any extra/missing geometry. Export to an STL, and boom.

[griffog]

Yup, that was my first thought and seems the simplest. But I've tried that, Sketchup just locks up when the .stl is imported

[Davo]

Marm, that sounds pretty easy...

I've installed SketchUp and the stl plugin:



I don't have an option to import an stl:



What am I missing?

[griffog]

Nothing, you need to use 'Import' not Open to read the .stil but I've tried on two machines including a powerful MacPro and SketchUp just hangs. Suspect the importer can't cope.

[Davo]

That is the window from the Import menu item. Perhaps my plugin isn't plugged in properly?

[griffog]

Possibly, I'm on a Mac and it's available as an option here. I auto installed mine from the Extension Warehouse.

[curious aardvark]

sketchup sucks.

Can't see it working - but you never know.

But I would like to know why s3d doesn't add any support to a floating model. That can't be right.