Meshes

Put a .jpg into a .bmp format. Did what had to be done to the .bmp and converted it into a mesh. Exported mesh into an .stl file. Then put .stl into Sli3er to make g.code and it is taking forever and 2 days! #1 What takes g.code so long? #2 Is this the right way to go about this process?

You may have a model with way too much detail. Can you post the stl file? If not how about a render? There’s an option in Slic3r, to ignore details under a certain threshold, but even with complex models, it doesn’t take long, save for a couple really, really complex ones.

Thank you for your response. Here is an .stl Let me know if not working.
Girl with frame-2.stl (3.78 MB)

I don’t think the file size is whats causing the issue here. There are intersecting faces in the model that are making it non-manifold. The new versions of slic3r are nice because a lot of non-manifolds it will automatically repair. Some types of non-manifolds will say that they have been automatically repaired, but will prevent the gcode from exporting in a timely manner.

I highly recommend using Blender to fix non manifolds. Here is how you do it for this model:

Open up Blender and import your .stl:


It should look something like this:

Press Tab to enter edit mode:

Press a to deselect everything and press z to enter wireframe:

Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+m to select all non-manifold vertices (you can barely see them, they are orange):

Zoom in on the non-manifolds and figure out why they are non-manifold:

These faces are intersecting, which will confuse slic3r, causing long export times. I don’t exactly know if this will work for your application, but I will show you one way to fix it just for purposes of demonstration. Lets select all the vertices that make up the outer walls:

(see next post)


and then scale the outer surface a bit by pressing s. We only want to scale in x and y so after we press s, we press shift+z (i’m overdoing it here so you can see whats going on – when we actually do it, we are just going to scale a tiny bit so as to preserve the original geometry as much as possible).

Here is what that corner looks like after the scale:

We have created a hole on each corner, which will also cause a non-manifold. You can see that it is non-manifold by deselecting everything with a and then using Ctrl+Shift+Alt+m again to select non-manifolds:

Then we can now fill the hole simply by pressing f:

Check for non-manifolds with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+m (there are non that I can see) and export the .stl:

I’ll upload the .stl I made for you in a second after I make sure it works with slic3r.

The plot thickens:

I went to convert the .stl to .gcode and it wouldn’t export again. I noticed that there were two shells:


So let’s look in Blender to see what’s going on. Put your cursor in the center of the mesh and press l (lowercase L) to select all linked geometry:

You can see that the frame is a seperate “shell” than the inside mesh. What’s more, there are intersecting faces between the two shells. Here is a view from the bottom of one of the corners:

We need to seperate the selection using p so that we have two objects, and then do a boolean union. Here is the seperation step (press p):

And here is the boolean step (leave edit mode with tab, select one of the meshes, apply boolean union – I have another thread where I go through this more in detail):

Now re-export the .stl and try to slic3 it again. Ima do this now and let you know what happens in the next post…

If we had a “Post of the week” I’d nominate this thread…

Here it is:
Girl with frame-2_repaired_repaired.stl (3.81 MB)

.gcode here, when it syncs

http://devel.lulzbot.com/ATTIC/Meshes

Thank you for the info and your time rufu5. I will give that a try my self for future projects. Very grateful.

After looking at your work, which I do appreciate. How smooth do you thick it will print? Every time we run this through a different “file”, does it loose detail and become flatten or distorted from the original? Just trying to keep as much detail as possible from original picture. But on the other hand it might look pretty cool being a little distorted…just a thought. Thanks again.

You can increase the smoothness of a model by using the subdivision surface modifier in Blender. The tricky part is doing a selective subdivision surface, otherwise you will end up with something that you probably don’t want. :wink: