Model in Preview Changes After Prepared to Print

[ajmadison49]

I've been working on my first original printed part for a couple of weeks now. I chopped it off a mesh I found on the internet. Just printing that chopped off mesh came out pretty good. I made some modifications and S3D basically filled everything inside the perimeter of the part. I learned that a bunch of unattached meshes confuses the slicer. So I redrew the part using watertight solids. Its currently two concentric tubes with a bunch vanes between the tubes, and a series of plates on the outside of the outer tube. When I import the file, I see what I drew in Rhino. But after running the slicer, the inner tube is all but missing, and the outer ring of plates, only the vertical edges of the plates are shown as being printed.

I'm theorizing that the S3D is being confused because, even though I have redrawn the piece with solids, it is not one big mesh.

Or is the problem more complex, in that solids intersect in various places, and those intersections confuse S3D, so as it transitions from one solid to another, it chooses to turn off printing.

Just curious, because I'm also learning how to use Rhino at the same time. Thanks in advance for the advice.

[CompoundCarl]

You want the mesh to be a single connected solid, not a bunch of self-intersecting sheets. Is there an option in Rhino to boolean together different bodies? That's what you need to do

[dkightley]

It might be worth trying using the Separate Connected Surfaces option on the Mesh dropdown menu and see if it helps.

I have to use it all of the time as the 3D package I favour doesn't do a very good job merging meshes.