Hi community! First of all, thank you for taking the time to read this.
It’s my first time trying to 3d print some parts in a resin 3d printer, I’m exporting an Stl file from Blender to Chitubox.
I have the part inside Blender looking pretty crisp and sharp (because is in auto smooth) and once I exported to stl and use that same file inside Chitubox it ends up looking like it was flat shaded.
Is there any way to mantain the geometry as it appears in the viewport without using subdivision modifier?
Image1 - model in Auto smooth shading, no modifiers
No. Obviously your viewport shading is a visual effect/illusion. Print geometry is wysiwyg.
What scale are you printing this at? If it’s small then you won’t noting the facets on the print. An easy way to check is to scale it out on your monitor to the size it will be in the real-world on your monitor. Can you see the facets?
Yess I imagined, it’s just that the Auto Smoooth shading looks really good and it’s not quite the same as if I do a subdiv and place sharpe edges manually…
Also, you may want to measure these in real-world scale in Blender. Depending on your print size these parts may be extremely thin and may fail when printed
The subdivs will be collapsed when you import to your slicer and it will convert to triangles. It’s good practice to decimate your file to triangles before export. That way you have full control and can model at much higher polycounts if you need to.
I’m still seeing the body unsmooth, you can actually see flat faces all around eventhough it has one level of subdivision applied. Any idea why is this happening?
I would also detach the lower poly elements and subdivide separately. Some parts look smoother than others. The model looks to be made of many parts just intersected so it should be easy. This way the polycount won’t be too high unnecessarily.
Also, this model looks like it was modeled for smooth shading. Ideally for sub-D models you want far fewer segments on rounded shapes.
Not intended to be 3d printed, I could separate or retouch even more but would it make much more difference?
How are standard models for 3d printing prepared? Should I increase face count so it doesn’t appear to have flat faces? As I said, first time using resin
You can put as much as you need. A balance between a low enough triangle count and a smooth looking mesh. I usually aim for between 1 and 2 million triangles at most for each separate print part.
Look forward to seeing your results.