Have a question for people who get stuff printed up. While my personal goals for this are a ways off, I recently made someone’s mascot for fun and practice. After seeing it she wants to get it printed. So I need to figure some things out as to how to get things ready in ZBrush. I’ve seen some people talk about decimating it if I recall correctly. The stuff I’ve had printed before has been from another program that doesn’t use poly based geometry, so not sure how big of an issue this is for printing. The other question I have is if I need to make it all a single piece of geometry of if simply merging down will suffice. I am aware of the water tight issues, just not sure if that will cause issues if I just merge down as opposed to making it all a single piece of geometry. Merging down would be a great deal simpler (and solve a lot of problems with my own personal work.) Anyway, any advice would be great.
Decimation might not be needed if the mesh isn’t gigantic. If it is, it can be helpful instead of sending a 3GB file to another program that might not be accustomed to working with large files, and especially if you’re uploading it to an online printing service which can sometimes have file size restrictions.
As for the mesh being a single object, this can depend on the type of printer. The ones I’ve worked with do allow you to have intersecting polygon islands, but if you do this you’ll want to make sure that the intersections are deep enough that the printer doesn’t try and print them as separate objects. So if you just have a belt or something that flows perfectly along the surface of the model, you might want to take the time to push it in a bit more.
Have a look at the tutorial in Zclassroom on thus very subject. It’s very god and I learned. A lot from it.