I spent a lot of time trying to add an even amount of thickness to parts of a mesh.
I tried various extrusions including Extrude Faces Along Normals, and tried many settings in the Solidify Modifier.
The best result came from manually ripping away faces and moving them up and out along projected edge lines.
I have what I need for a paint-over assignment in a painting app but I would love a little insight into where I got lost - am I asking too much of Blender? Are there other ways or other tools / add-ons I could have used?
Well… for multiple different length of edges there is no way how there might be a somehow simple solution if all faces are only rectangular… but as soon ther are some other angles then there is the questions where to extrude… For example in the part labled Blender Extrude/Solidify the dumb computer just doesn’t knowhow you meant the extrusion to be … here it may be something like extrusionin Z with same “target value”… bit this already would not work if you had another step-like curvation in you object… because then this z-target value has to be two different ones… so it’s not a global but a local value…
You see… the more complex the object is then the more complex the alogrithm has to be to include every (at least some amount of) possibility you might imagine… so the user can do what is needed… but then there will be one use case where it would work again…
So it’s the usual answer… If you have to tell explicitly what you want for an indivial use case… then it is easier to know some of the technics used to make this and make it mannually for this one case… even if you have mutliple individual cases…
It’s called modeling and the reason why there are so much of 3D-modelers are needed in the industry… (albeit interchangable)…
I understand the normal values might change for each mesh element and the direction I want to extrude various elements might be different and vary over the model.
EDIT:
So that I did not spend a huge amount of time modelling this, I modelled the right half of the front and the right corner then mirrored this on the X and Y which applied the design around the mesh.
and the reason why there are so much of 3D-modelers are needed in the industry… (albeit interchangable)…