I have a blender assembly to be 3D Printed that includes small intermeshing gears and close-fitting/contacting parts that must interact properly in the physical world. So, that involves strictly observing the clearance spec of a given print process. One option is Alt-S to shrink/flatten faces along their normal direction. But its scaling control is in units of length. I’ve found that it produces a change in the normal distance of shrunk/flattened faces that is something like ten times that length. Is that length part of an undisplayed ratio or something? How does that define a scale? How to use it to precisely set gap widths? I’m aware that the solidify modifier is another (and probably easier) option too. Thx
Setting Properties → Units → Unit Scale to 0.001 turned out to solve the issue. The model was already the correct size. The right Unit Scale makes Alt-S scale to the correct normal distance. Cheers.
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