I’m trying to find a consistent (repeatable) means of doing a make-3D of an alpha and coming up with a solid that is flat across at the zero Z elevation, or even better, have the zero elevation thickened so that the result is essentially a block with the alpha mesh neatly pasted to it. I need a method where I can apply the technique to a series of alphas producing results identical except for the alpha information, to then be exported and 3D printed as tiles that will mate up at the edges.
On my first attempts with Make 3D, I turned off the double-sided and got the mesh, then tried to use close holes to generate the back. This nearly worked, but the edges do not all resolve exactly to the zero elevation so the backface ended up rather wonky. And, I couldn’t see how to add thickness to the model at the zero elevation.
Attempting to paste the generated mesh to a cube in dynamesh would probably work but getting consistent results over a series of alphas seems troublesome, perhaps best done with a script which is also troublesome for something that ought to be simple I would think.
Is there some means of doing an edge extrusion and then a close holes that would do it? How edge loops work is kind of fuzzy to me, but I will look into it if there is a solution in that direction.
Here’s a video showing approximately what I want to do, done in Meshmixer except I just want a square tile, but I was rather hoping to find an easy solution in ZB and not have to mess with Meshmixer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VdaxykVrB8
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A.