I have simulated lots (about 100) unevenly shaped objects falling in a big pile. Car tyres, wheels, barrels, pipes etc etc. It should resemble a pile of junk, found in a shanty town or post apocalyptic environment.
Since it is done with a physics animation, the meshes doesn’t intersect.
Now I need it to be 3D printable. So all the objects must become one solid mesh. I will naturally loose lots of details in the process, that is fine.
The separate objects looks like this:
My approach so far is to use shrinkwrap and project a very dense mesh from the top. Step by step, refining the mesh (dyntopo: detail flood fill), smooth vertices, shrinkwrap again (now closest surface instead of project). Repeat until mesh looks acceptable. Decimate lots. Clean up dirty geometry.
It now looks like this:
It’s ok. But does anyone have any suggestions to improve the workflow and maybe get better results?