Hey folks. So I’m designing a little bunker building that will be 3D printed for a tabletop wargame. Here’s where I’m at so far, but its only like half done
Anyway, what I’m trying to do is have 6-8 rivets going up and down the edges of the armor plates. At first I was messing with the Array modifier but I’d like these rivets to actually be a part of the mesh instead of extra pieces. Also it might be a pain to line up the arrays properly since the sides are kind of rounded. I want the final product to be all 1 big mesh since it’s going to be a 3D print.
Anyone know if there’s an easy way to do this? Or is the array modifier the best way? and if that’s the case, would I have to attach them all with a boolean modifier? Or is there also a better way for that too?
It looks fine as it is, I wouldn’t bother with the rivets, unless the rivets in your games universe are 2-3 feet across.
But, if you must have rivets, then the array modifier is the way I’d go, when you have them in the positions that your happy with, just join the objects together.
No they would be normal sized rivets this building will be about 5-6" long and in 15mm scale. The rivets will just be like little dots or pin heads going around the rectangular armor plates.
There are ways to do this but because this is going to be printed the ways become nontrivial ( I just love using that word!) If you show a close up screenshot of your mesh or even post your file we can see how easy or hard it might be. By way of warning - the array mod and Booleans will probably NOT work for printing!
Why are booleans bad for printing? I was planning to use that for a lot of things. Like, this model is going to be cut in half across the middle between the 3rd and 4th panel along the side. So I was going to do a peg sticking out of 1 piece and a hole on the other, so you can line them up good and snap them together. So I was going to do a boolean to add the peg to the one side and cut the hole in the other. And I was planning to use it to add on some pieces, because I read many times that for 3D printing you need to have 1 complete water tight mesh, not different meshes stuck together.
anyway here’s a shot of my mesh. It started as a cube and it’s been scaled and extruded a bazillion times to get where I am now. I’m just working on the one corner, and right now I’m using a mirror modifier for X and Y to get the full shape… and then I’ll apply the modifier at the very end. I just want to make sure everything will be symmetrical before I make it permanent.
Boolean is usually best especially for 3D-printing, only geometry counts, not topology. And if Blender boolean fails, use better (http://cloud.netfabb.com).
You can try face snap with rivets or sculpting with rivets height map.
Thanks for the info, TT. To the OP I guess you should use Booleans and tat would be the easiest way to add all the things you want. Since topology doesn’t matter I would just pick all the line segments you want rivets on, duplicate them subdivide them however many times and parent it to a rivet use dupliverts and all your rivets will be in place. Shortest way I can think of placing them. of course then you will have to make duplicates real and bool them on to the mesh.
this building will be about 5-6" long and in 15mm scale. The rivets will just be like little dots or pin heads going around the rectangular armor plates.