I am wondering, for a long time I have made jewelry out of a single closed solid, do I still have to do that or is it possible to have a piece that is composed of many different solids (STLs) but not joined into one solid? I hope you know what I mean here because it’s really just a simple question.
Piece made from stls but not joined?
rkundla
#2
I think the answer is: “It depends”.
Are you saying you have multiple shells you have not booleaned together? If that is the case, it will probably work okay unless the algorithm for slicing has a problem where they interact together.
J.Verschoor
#3
Hi jefree,
Our GPU slicing engine can can handle many intersecting meshes without issue, as long as they are closed solids.
For vector slicing and infill generation very large numbers of intersections can result cause performance issues. As everything must be booleand in order to generate the proper infill paths.
If you look closely at our supports, they are actually built up out of many intersecting meshes.
In general it should work fine, and can be much easier to 3D model. There are some drawbacks to this approach however; you cannot easily blend or fillet between solids and any repair algorithms used downstream will have trouble understanding what to fix.
If you are outsourcing your print work, they might require single unified meshes for their internal workflow.