Hi, I am doing okay with Blender making mechs (Robots) but am trying to make a Diorama for a haunted house and even though I have dbl checked the vertices and faces Cura and other slicing software keep telling me that it is non manifold and will not print. I used the 3d Print tool in blender to make it manifold and it just deletes my walls (see attached pics) I am not sure how I can print something complex like a mech but not a simple room. The problem areas are apparently above and below the doorways and I have no idea of how to fix this problem. I have a resin style printer on the way if that matters. I have tried this with each room joined and separated into each piece (Floor and 4 walls). I cannot seem to attach the blender or stl file.
Have you tried triangulating all the surfaces before using the print tool?
It seems like the N-gons (if there are any?) might be problematic because they are getting triangulated in the output to STL in a way you are not anticipating.
For the printing I have done, I would just use the Select --> Select All by Trait --> Non Manifold to find issues.
I would first go into edit mode, switch to vertex, and press “a” twice quickly to deselect everything and then find the non manifold culprits.
Since your model look to be quite simple, it shouldn’t take long to fix them up.
Also good to recalculate normals to make sure they are correctly identifying inside/outside.
Hi, I am still fairly new to blender so I an not even sure what an n-gon is. I bought an indepth instructional on Blender and will study up this weekend.
I was able to get a single room to work yesterday by starting all over and made sure there were no extra vertices, edges, or faces anywhere and Instead of making the walls wrap around the floor I made the floor bigger and made the walls sit on it. I also ditched Cura and went to a different program than used the make solid function and viola! It worked.
I did give me one wall w/pink or red lines which I am told means the normals are backwards from how you are looking at them, not sure what that means. I know vertices, edges, and faces but not normals.
I did that and it would show me things like an edge of a doorway but when I tripple checked everything all of the faces and edges looked fine. I did finally get one to work by starting over and changing the way the walls meet the floor. I also ditched Cura and used the make solid command.
Normals define which way the face is pointing. For 3d printing the normals for each face should all be pointing out.
To recalculate them - from Edit mode: Mesh --> Normals --> Recalculate Outside
You should also look into merging vertices - you can easily get multiple vertices in one location which can cause things to be non-manifold. Use M to bring up the merge menu.
There’s probably lots of simple tutorials on YouTube that will show you how to merge vertices and fix normals.
“ngons” is just a term for faces with more than 4 edges.
