I would really love to see a comprehensive set of 3D printing tools incorporated into Zbrush. I make this proposal in hopes that I’m not the only one with this desire. If I get a big YAWN in reply, then I know I’m alone and, well, too bad for me. But if enough people say “hey, I like that idea,” maybe Pixo will implement it. Ya never know unless ya try. 
So with all that out of the way, here’s my proposal for 3D printing tools I would like to see:
Measuring tools:
Wall-thickness: Displayed as a heat map. Red areas are thinnest and blue areas are thickest, determinable by input value. For example, if I want the walls of a model to be no thinner than 1mm and no thicker than 5mm, then I would plug those values into an input field and the results would be displayed as a heatmap on the model with any areas -1mm showing up in red, +5mm showing up in blue. Areas that fall within the allotted range could be green or gray. This would allow us to make sculpting decisions concerning thickness much more effectively.
Volume, surface area, bounding box: Fairly straightforward. The “print exporter” already displays bounding box measurements but volume and surface area are also very important values to know.
Rulers: A drag-ruler would come very much in handy. Click on one point, drag to another point, measurement displays.
Sculpting:
Internal thickness maker: There are several ways to create internal thickness on a Zbrush model and some of them work quite well on simpler models but on complex models, creating internal thickness can be a nightmare. I would like the ability to create an internal thickness on a model simply by determining thickness as an input value. Say I have a model ready for printing except that he has no thickness. I want him to be uniformly 2mm thick so I put “2mm” into an input field or slider or whatever and thickness is created based on that setting. It would be nice if there was a way to ensure that the thickness would not intrude into any areas that would cause thickness problems (fingers, toes, thin poles etc). I don’t even know if this is possible but it would make printing complex models up a WHOLE LOT easier and more efficient.
Non-manifold geometry and tunnel detector: Any areas of a mesh that are non-manifold should be highlighted with the click of a button. I think the “mesh integrity check” automatically fixes non-manifoldness… I think… but sometimes I’ve noticed it can create holes and when I click “fill holes” it creates more non-manifold geometry. When working with millions of polys, it can be extremely tedious to identify where the offending geometry is so I can fix it by hand (this usually happens with Dynamesh). I don’t mind having to fix non-manifold geometry by hand but locating the bad polys can be a HUGE pain sometimes. So it would be great to have the option of instantly knowing where all the trouble areas are The biggest offender seems to be where thin walls form because Dynamesh likes to create holes and/or tunnels. Maybe there could be a way to detect those little tunnels as well? Holes are easy enough to deal with (fill holes) but those tunnels are a nuisance.
Printability check: A simple check to ensure the basic printability of a model. A lot of programs can do this but it would be nice to have the feature inside of Zbrush.
That’s pretty much it. Or that’s all I can think of anyway.
I can already foresee the criticism, “but there are other programs that do these things.” And that’s true to some extent, there are. But I have a strong feeling that no one could do it better. When Pixo sets out to do something they DO it and they DO it better than anyone else. Blender has some of these features but they are practically unusable. Several other programs can do some of this stuff very basically but not terribly well. That’s not even touching on the fact that Zbrush handles highpoly models better than most any other program out there and bringing highpoly models into some of these other programs can be a nightmare in and of itself. I know Pixo could implement such a tool set very well and not only that, but it would be nice not having to hop back and forth between so many different programs.
So, all that having been said:
“Would you like to see a comprehensive 3D printing tool set implemented in Zbrush?”
Yes or no? Thoughts?
Until/if they ever fix that feature, it will be totally unusable for someone like me who works with high poly models. Not only does Blender have problems with big poly counts but when using that heatmap function, I found I couldn’t even see any of the heatmap past the wireframe. Turning off wireframe didn’t help either because the heatmap function only worked in edit mode. Basically what happened is that I did everything in my power to get it to work well and it just wasn’t happening. I stopped trying to use that feature in frustration.
This makes me happy.
I sure hope so. I might post a link to this thread on Shapeways and in a few other places to see if we can get some traction with these suggestions. It’s not like I EXCPECT anything from Pixo per se but at the same time, it would be REALLY REALLY nice to have features like this in Zbrush, as someone who 3D prints things for a living. ^__^;