Merging Meshes For 3d Printing

SyaPed

I'm talking with a 3d printing company about getting a model printed but they're asking that I combine all the separate elements into one continuous mesh. As far as I knew having a model made up of separate intersecting elements was fine for 3d printing but if I was to try and boolean this thing together does anyone have any software recommendations? Or is anything boolean related still a nightmare these days...

cptSwing

Autodesk Meshmixer might be an easy alternative?

pior

Simply ... ask them again. There was probably some sort of miscommunication at some point, or maybe you ended up being connected to the wrong person. Open meshes (non watertight) definitely cause problems, but interpenetrating objects are completely fine since the toolpath interpreter will always see them as closed elements. If that wasn't the case zbrush sculpts would be impossible to print.

SyaPed

That's what I thought too, Pior. Communication is a little tricky, 99% of 3d printers seem to be in Poland? But I'm pretty sure they want me to combine things into as few meshes as possible, one single mesh if I want it printed as one piece. They sent this picture as an example...

pior

Yeah it's tricky ... And who knows, maybe it depends on the software. All that said you could always dynamesh everything together. There are some other highly specialized software available for that sort of stuff too but Zbrush will probably do a great job !