Hello,
New to the forums, and I wanted to jump on here and see if I could get some advice on a simple mold design that I would like to 3D print.
Essentially the idea is to make a 2-piece mold of a long, thin tube. The first test would only be 8 inches long and the diameter would be around 10mm (about the size of a regular bungee cord). I am also looking to have 4 keys on the mold to help lock it in place. And lastly, I would like to make each piece as hollow as effectively possible, so it will save cost on printing. I am attaching pictures to help get an idea of what I mean.
The problem that I am having is trying to get the overall total pixel points low enough to print while keeping my edges nice and clean and the surfaces smooth without lines on the inside of the tube area of the mold. Even with splitting both objects, the count is still too high to print. I am trying to get down to around 50 to 60 MB for the final stl. file size but it seems impossible to do with a clean model and low total points. Let me explain how I am going about making the model, and I hope you guys might have some tips or better ideas of going about it.
I am starting with a cube and turning it into a Qcube under initialize and then I bring the x, y, z res down to 1. From there, I use the move tool to turn it into the rectangular long box shape that I need. After this, I append a cylinder, and to smooth the topology I can either do this by dividing it a couple of times or I can use QCylinder in the initialize option and change x, y, z res up to 100. Either outcome has been about the same overall, but at this point, I stretch and enlarge the cylinder for the size of the tube hole and then boolean out of the rectangular box leaving me usually with the boolean model with 34 to 39,000 total points. Definitely manageable, and both pieces have clean surfaces and edges but nothing is dynameshed at this point.
To keep the edges and surfaces clean, I generally have to dynamesh the resolution to 600, which gives me around at that point 8 to 10 million active points to keep it somewhat close to the original clean edges and smoothness, but it is still noticeable around the edges. And the tube areas start to show lines. Then if I want to create a shell I need to also dynamesh again and at that point because of more topology, it increases my total active points to around 23,000 million. At this point, there is no way to decimate the model down to around 45 to 60 thousand active points and still keep the model clean when preparing it for the stl. file. Or at least the way that I am going about it.
If anyone has any advice or a different way that I could do this, please let me know. It really is a pretty simple shape but I am trying to get a clean model to print and has been quite challenging. I feel like I am either doing it entirely wrong or I am just missing something but any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read through this giant post. I look forward to hearing back from you guys. Thank you again.
