Hi there,
i am using ZBrush a lot to do work, which gets printed later.
Its so nice, that Pixologic has included some cool tools for that
purpose, and i could not live without the STL exporter or the
Decimation Master.
But i am still missing some minor tools, which would make my
work even more easy, and which would make it possible that i
can do my work entirely in ZBrush. Here is what i would suggest:
- - Evaluate wall thickness.
- For the sake of saving money, i always try to make my models as thin as possible. 3D printing prices are mostly calculated on volume, therefore making your objects hollow is a great way to save money, and the thinner the walls, the lesser volume is used. Aside of that, certain print processes need to maintain a certain stability of the printed parts, because they are quite fragile after frinting, and need to be infused with additional hardening chemicals. Such a funtion would help to avoid faulty prints, because of too fragile objects.
- - Evaluate Volume
- With this, it will be possible, to calculate the effective volume, and therefore have a price for your print project. That would be helpfull to maintain budgets and a good help, if you have to do a proposal for a - customer.
- - Check for a watertight object
- All 3d printers alike oly like watertight meshes, which dont have holes, gaps or unweld vertexes. With such a function, one could make sure, that the printer software will not refuse to accept a object for printing.
- - Fuse Vertexes and fill Holes
- That would help to repair errors, which turned up after the check for watertightness.
- - Apply absolute Scaling and use of Units
- In 3D Printing you always want to know how big your object is, and you want to know that in the measuring system of your choice. So it would help a lot, if you would be able, to set the construction grid to a certain size (inches, cm or whats in question). This would help very much to decide, if the object you work on has the size of 10 inch, which might be the max. your 3D printer can do.
Last year i attended the Euromold trade fair here in Frankfurt / Germany, which is focusing mostly on 3D printing and rapid prototyping. There i saw at least one application, which tried to supply the functionality of ZBrush, enhanced with a 3D printing toolset. Needless to say, that the sculpting functionality did not match ZBrushs, but nonetheless, they sold that app at a price way higher than pixologic.
I am not saying, that Pixologic should raise prices! What i want to say is, that with some modifications ZBrush can conquer that market segment single handed.
Best regards,
Heiner