If I want to get rid of the internal faces and only retain the outside faces which can be seen from this graph, what is the best way to achieve that without too much manual work? (I have a lot of characters to deal with, so I am seeking an automatic way)
I have tried clean the mesh up and use “Intersect (Knife)”, but that does not do the job cleanly. It still misses some faces and leaving them extruded inside the shape. Basically I only want to keep the contour of the mesh.
You could try selecting everything on the outside, duplicating it, and then deleting everything else. Question is how often this shape is going to show up and what it’s being used for.
Some faces on the surface partially extrude inside the shape. So even if I delete the inverse, the inside portion of those surfaces faces still remain inside the shape. It is easier to see this if you try out my example (attached to the end of the original post)
The shape is to provide a thick base support for characters whose stokes are too thin to 3D print. Straight extrusion, followed by tapering does not work, because it does not generate omnidirectional base (It at most skews the baseline shape). The bevel effect of a curve, however, does extend to all directions.
I’m a Blender newbie so forgive the question if its obvious …
Would there be any way Shrinkwrap would work here or would the intersections also present a problem?
Shrinkwrap is actually the best way I can found and it works pretty well. Comparing to the heightmap approach talked about here BlenderExchange, the shrinkwrap approach is easier to operate and involves less processes.
Here is how I do it, first create a plane mesh over the beveled object, subdivide the surface with 30 slices:
Add subdivision surface and shrinkwrap modifiers. The subdivisions need to set to 4 or 5. The mode of the shrinkwrap need to be “Project” (You might need to turn on “Negative” if “Positive” doesn’t work.)
