Importing STL Files

Support Modeling
1

Hi all

I have successfully imported a STL file (exported from Autodesk Inventor). After importing I have to remove doubles throughout as it imports it not as one object, but as a set of individual faces. When I then try and apply a subsurf, it creates a horrible mess, does anyone have an idea as to why this may be?

Any advice as to how to avoid this problem is greatly appreciated.

Pictures:
www.adamwestmagic.com/before.jpg
www.adamwestmagic.com/after.jpg

   Thanks

      Adam
2

The model is made out of triangles, and in general, triangles and subsurf don’t mix very well. Some of the problems might be fixed by going to edit mode and selecting all, then pressin ‘alt + J’ to join triangles and make quads, but not everything will be fixed by this though.

To be able to use this model and subsurf together, it will require quite a lot of work.

3

Not certain this is your problem, but this is easy enough to try…

It might be that your vertex-to-vertex distance is below the ‘Remove Doubles’ limit, which I believe is defaulted to 0.001 units. You can either try to reduce this limit to 0.0001, or scale your entire object (or objects) in Object mode to 10x or 100x, THEN try to Remove Doubles. Once you’ve removed doubled, you can scale back down again, if necessary.

So… once you’ve imported your object, ensure you are in Object mode (TAB) and hit A once or twice to select everything. Hit S (for scale) and then type 100 (one-zero-zero) then hit enter. Your objects will be 100x its former size. Hit tab to get into edit mode, then A until all vertices are selected. Then perform your Remove Doubles operation.

Hope this helps…