My dad’s getting a CNC printer. Says it’s the wave of the future and a good money making opportunity, so I’ve been doing some practicing.
I have this object, nothing I’d actually print, just something to check the limits. It’s an elongated plane tapered at both ends with a hole in the center, a subdivision surface modifier applied (as in applied and removed from the stack), and a solidify modifier applied. The solid check goes well, as do the thickness and edge sharp tests. My brother told me overhang isn’t anything to worry about. It just means I need to model supports or the printer software itself will add them in when it converts to g code.
The problem comes with the degenerate faces check. It’s not an issue when it’s 5’ x ~10’ but when I scale it down to what the printer can handle (in the neighborhood of 8" if it’s the one he’s thinking of getting) it flags the majority of the faces. I’ve tried reducing the geometry down as much as I could without changing the shape and that fixed part of it. It still flagged the faces in the hole, though, and a few I couldn’t fix by reducing the geometry (accomplished through deleting edge loops, though I imagine there’s a better technique I don’t know about. The decimate modifier makes a mess of it, though). When I lower it from the default 0.0001 to 0.00001 it doesn’t flag any faces but until I have a printer to test on I’m afraid to adjust any of the numbers.
Converting the zero faces into larger ngons keeps them from being flagged as degenerate but then it fails the distortion test. Do I need to wait and check out the limits of the printer itself and adjust the numbers accordingly or am I expecting too much detail from a CNC printer? My brother showed a Dalek he printed out and it seems to have a fairly high level of detail (including the spheres around the body) so I’m sure a printer could handle what I modeled.