For 3D printing all the normals need to be pointing outside the object. (The previous blog article, on STL file format, has more detail). The order in which the vertices are listed and stored determines the direction of the normal.The concept of normal comes from geometry, used extensively in graphics, and is simply a line that is perpendicular to a surface.The metaphor that is commonly used is: if the object were filled with water it wouldn’t leak.The first step is to select the vertexes/edges surrounding the hole, and the next step is to fill the hole, or make new face(s) or edge(s). Again, this is trivial, but just to get the basics down, the problem is fixable.A trivial example is the following cube with 16 faces to each side, except there is one missing face, and this will likely generate an error in when sent to a 3DPrinter. The Basics: Holes and Normals A Hole in the Surface of the Object: For the purposes here, Blender, a free open-source package is used, but other modeling packages, commercial or free, can work too. It is left to the readers’ discretion to decide if the total amount of the time and effort need to fix the problems with a model is viable.įollowing are some details and some of the steps that can be used to fix problems with holes and inverted normals. Note, however, that hand editing individual vertices, edges and faces is only realistic if there problem areas are ether small and localized or if the total number of points is small. In many cases, spending some time to editing the model can produce an object that is viable for 3D printing. These types of problems tend to arise if the models were produced or scanned, using software packages that were not necessary designed with 3D printing in mind. Holes within the object and inverted normals are the most common. Issues and errors that arise because of flaws in the structure of the model can be the most frustrating errors to fix when it comes to 3D printing. It includes the steps need to fix holes within the object and shows how to inverted normals. This tutorial uses Blender to fix common issues and errors that arise because of the structure of a model is not suited to 3DPrinting.
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