Odd thing happening when scaling up, please take a look

[walele 0]

Hello from a UM newbie!

The story so far:

- I created a 6cm-long "castle" model in Sketchup based on my daughter's requirements...

- I ran a test print at scale 1:2, and the complete gate was printed (obviously not too well because of the scale but that's not my point here), then tried at normal scale, and the vertical bars of the gate did not print at all!! :shock:

Any ideas?

(I'm using RepG, if that helps...)

Thanks a lot!

valerie

[futurejames 0]

I don't have a solution; I just popped in to say I have similar Sketchup problems.

I started using OpenSCAD to cut down on my swearing.

[walele 0]

Thanks for the tip!

[ian 32]

yup welcome to the crazy world of 3d modelling for 3d printing.

I guess the problem is, the geometry of these bars are over lapping of course, so these beautiful intersections in 3d space are being taken as negative zero space by the printer. there for... nothing.

two tips that have helped me before.

(1) try selecting one set of bars, horizontal for example and then move them out away from the other bars, maybe.. 5mm. the little space can help the printer see the definition between all the bars a little better.

(2) can work, print the castle with the opening, then copy and past the gate detail into a new sketch, print them as two seperate parts, i find a lot of the time, when i split complex models into a few core pieces, that makes the whole process easier for the printer.

final tip, try this guy. it is a meshing program for sketchup (free addon)

http://www.cadspan.com/tools

the idea is maybe for the future the best, taking a model with intersecting geometry and rapping a big plastic bag around it to create one clean mesh. so give that a spin and let us know how you get on.

best wishes.

Ian

[owen 19]

Have you had a look at the STL file outputted from Sketchup to see if that looks OK

[Daid 306]

 

(I'm using RepG, if that helps...)

I suggest using Cura, it allows you to preview the GCode and then you can see if your printer will output the gate or not.

[futurejames 0]

Ian thanks for the link I'm going to play with that this weekend. There was a few models I abandoned in Sketchup because I could never get them to print correctly.

I second the Cura suggestion.

[walele 0]

thanks everyone,

I'll give Cura a try first. I tried CADspan but got an error message when getting the file back after inspection, and that was that. I'll give it another go and post again with the results.

cheers!