I’m working on designing some cookie cutters in Blender for 3D printing. I create 3 separate pieces: the cutter outline, some extruded text, and a base for the text to sit on. I’m starting my designs out in Illustrator, then importing them into Blender as SVG files.
An issue I’m having is merging the text base with the cookie cutter outline. I always get weird geometry/faces where the two pieces intersect. Maybe I’m a bit obsessive, but I’d like to have cleaner geometry.
I’m using BoolTools (Union) for my Boolean, but I’m getting the same results when I use Blender’s Boolean modifier.
You can see there are faces that go under the outline of the cookie cutter sides, as if the bottom face of the cookie cutter side isn’t stuck to the base. This is causing an area of non-manifold geometry.
Is there any way to get this cleaner geometry without a lot of manual work in Edit mode? Can I shape or position my text base differently to get a better result?
Boolean does not work well with so called “overlapping faces”, the solution to this is to move one of them down, even if its just a fraction of a millimetre, then performing the boolean operation, followed by a Remove Doubles operation to get rid of the geometry along the “seam” where the two meshes got merged (if nessacary).
Note - Make sure to use Boolean “Brush” and not the auto boolean feature in the Bool Tool menu. This will give you the ability to experiment to figure out what’s causing the problems.
Tips: When 3D printing, you dont NEED to have everything as a single mesh. What will happen if two meshes are inside each other is just that it will print one inside the other, without really causing any issues. However, its good practise to avoid this when possible, but dont go out of your way to do it.
Another tip: I dont know if you downloaded this model online, but if you did make it yourself, dont triangulate it. This is done in the very last step when you export it, it does not even have to be triangulated in the program, there is a button for it in the export menu
And if you forget it, the slicer program will most likely do it for you.
This might seem like a daft question, but why don’t you just build clean quad polygon geometry in Blender rather than importing from another package? What you have shown us there can easily be built in Blender… You might even produce images of designs from another package, then use them as reference images in Blender to built against:
Thank you both for the replies. I’ll try the suggestions to move one item down and experiment with Boolean brush.
Coming from a graphic design program, it’s just much easier and faster for me to build the outline in Illustrator. I did have the idea last night to join my shapes in the SVG outline before I start extruding areas. I’m thinking that might give me the clean geometry I’m looking for.
