First of all, famous sentence: “I am very new modeling and I have very little
experience with Blender” :eyebrowlift:
Anyway, I’m trying to model this very simple object. It is opto gate for endstops of
my 3d printer. I want to create 3d footprint for KiCad, so I can generate model of whole board.
But I’m not sure if I created those pins correctly. I dare to say that I understand difference between
edit mode and object mode. And I created those pins as new meshes within a same object. Now, as
shown in next pictures, those pins act exactly like I would expect. They are selected separately from
original mesh.
Thing I want to ask, is how this affect overal model? Is it against some best practises or something?
It actually works quite well in KiCad, and finished model of electronic board is good for my purposes. But
I’m still not sure if this is the right way, I’ve read about importance of non-manifold vertices for 3d printing
purposes or physics simulations. So does this violate some rules? and if so, how can I make those meshes
physically connect?
Although with my approach to model this, i will always get these internal faces and fixing them is not
by any means hard, but its kind of boring and tedious. Not to mention with more complex shapes. Is there
something wrong with my approach?
First I create plane and then extrude its corner edge three times. Then I extrude individual faces up. I mean, is there
better way to do this shape without creating internal faces?
And also, please let me ask one more thing. Look at image below, there are two cubes with cyliders attached. Cube on the
left has cyllinder as a part of its mesh (its physically connected to its edges) whereas cube on the right has only added new
mesh within same object (cylinder edges are not connected with cube).
Invalid attachments so can’t see any of the images you’re showing but I answer based on the text. Also it would be a good idea to attach a .blend when asking questions.
It’s often easier and faster to only add geometry when you need it. For example
Vertical cuts with loop cut and slide (ctrl+R, scroll wheel up)
One horizontal cut
Deleted two edges to get the opening. Edge select mode (ctrl+tab), selected with shift+RMB, X -> edges
Could select two edges on opposite sides and fill with F, but faster to select edges around the hole (alt+RMB), deselect two edges to have two edge loops on both sides and W -> bridge edge loops. That fills the opening quickly.
Lastly selected one edge on the side and beveled it (ctrl+B). That creates an n-gon (a face with more than 4 vertices) that is marked red, but it’s a convex one so shouldn’t be a problem for 3D printing. If exporting gives troubles, could triangulate those faces (ctrl+T).
Can’t see what is happening but if you can keep them separate the better. Less polygons and easier to handle.
Edit: Of course there are many other ways to model.
Could also handle it as 2D profile and then extrude everything to get the thickness (top row).
Or could also use solidify modifier to get the thickness. If that is the final shape, modifier doesn’t need to be applied (by pressing the apply button on it) so you can keep adjusting it.
I fixed images, but your response was great even without my images So really thank you.
About those cubes with cylinders, I’ll simply try to process them with slicer software and examine
if there is something different.
Your method of creating same shape is indeed different from one I did. So thank you for some inspiration
So overall, I think we can call this thread solved.
So really thank you.