Why is cura doing this to me?

[cloakfiend 995]

Yeah send it over, ill sort it for ya. You really should have made this in illustrator to begin with. Its just a simple one click extrude to get to what you want i think.

Vector files are point based files rather than pixel based bitmap files. When you are in illustrator and draw your shape and are happy with it, you save it. Now depending on what version of illustrator you have it will save it as that version by default, but at the saving screen it gives you legacy options which means you can save it as older versions of illustrator and this is what you must do for pretty much all 3d apps that import ai files. Ai(adobe illustrator). Save it as version 8or nine 9 whatever works. Then import your shape in 3dsmax and extrude it however much you want. Done. Mind you you may have to apply an xform first just to scale it up so that the scale of units will match your file. I guess if you dont have a clue it may confuse you at the start as its a lot to learn but really it only takes a few minutes to do in practice. Im sure you could do it in one minute if you were quick. I dont have blender btw. I ideally would want a 2d version of what you want to make the 3d version of it quickly.

Pm me a link.

Edited August 23, 2015 by Guest

[ply2 1]

You could download the "old" cura (15.04.2 or so?) and tinker with the "fix horrible" settings in the "expert settings" dialog (first idea: try turning them all OFF except "extensive stitching").

Alternatively you can try minkowski() with your object and a tiny cube in openscad.

[cloakfiend 995]

I'd highly recommend just fixing it manually. Letting any program do stuff automatically to 'FIX' problems with your print may be worth one shot, but you really should just learn to do things right or you will only run into deeper problems further down the line.

3D is not very diffiecult once you understand polygon flow and work with even distribution of polys and keep them under control not pointlessly having too many or too little which also causes print issues. Ideally just get someone to show you the basics in a day and you will be fine. basically if it looks messy, then the polygons are bad. You need to remember cura loves tris rather than quads, so if in doubt convert all your models to tri's. Especially from Maya, i didnt seem to need to do this from Max.

One of the main problems people run into is booleans. (cutting stuff out of stuff and embossing, but this is very easy with 3d as cura doesn't give a damn about normals (cura 15.02.01 anyways not the new cura!) and screwed up polygons, as opposed to animation or serious modelling. So even this is not too difficult. 3D printing lets you get away with alot of bad habits in 3D that noobs will most likely pick up.

Im gonna do a quick tut on 3D scanning cleanup and print in case people want to know a few basics and start doing more advanced stuff.