I’m making a helmet, it consists of several shields. I will print them in parts, so I need their parts to match perfectly for better gluing. at the same time, there should be a small gap between them (due to the specifics of 3D printing), so a simple boolean will not work.
how can I do it better? adjusting the walls manually is a long job, and the gap will still be uneven.
Hello @purga86
I have two suggestions.
Append a 2d plane at low resolution to your tool. Sculpt the plane into shape to act as a cutting mesh with Live Boolean. Once the plane is positioned, extrude the polygons on the plane to the desired thickness with ZModeler. If all the polygons are extruded at the same time the thickness will be uniform. Live Boolean produces better results if all the meshes have a similar level of resolution, so you may want to further subdivide the cutting mesh.
Select the Knife Curve brush, and while holding down Shift+ Ctrl enable the Brush> Clip Brush Modifiers> BRadius option. Now when using the Knife Curve it will cut a section of mesh out along the path based on the brush size. However, if you begin your stroke and then hold down ALT after starting it, it will instead cut out a negative space along the stroke based on the brush size. In this way you can separate a mesh into two pieces with a gap of whatever thickness you prefer.
As a general strategy, it’s typically easier to create pieces that conform to each other from the start rather than trying to fit them together after the fact. A different modeling approach may make this easier for you.
