How to "thicken" models with extremely thin shells?

[Gian Pablo]

So I'm working on a project that uses scanned models, and we're running into an issue. Basically, some of the models end up with very thin shells, and when they are processed through Skeinforge, they end up being ignored. Instead of a thin, single filament shell, there is a hole in the model.

Is there any way to tell Skeinforge to always use at least two filament thicknesses on a thin part of the model?

Failing that, are there any procedures in Meshlab or Netfabb that can do this? Basically, go through a model, and make sure that no part is thinner than a specified minimum?

[James McCracken]

Is the problem that the original item has very thin walls? Or is the
problem that the resultant mesh files only model the skin?

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[Bill Culverhouse]

A picture or an STL would be helpful in determining the problem.

 

-b

[The Ruttmeister]

In a word, no,

None of those tools are even close to clever enough to do this (as far
as I know).

Theres certainly no current tool in SF. I suppose one could be
written, but you'd need to find someone who can program in python!

Can you not scale the STL up? That would be the simplest way to fix
it, even though it might mean cutting the file into even more parts.

The other option is to import the STL into sketchup and maually
editing the mesh (or you could try meshmixer).

Or try and chase super fine resolution... how fine are you down to
now?

[Mark Durbin]

You could try union-ing the STL with 3 other copies of itself each offset slightly from the first in x/y/z planes.  the overall model would be slightly bigger, but it may mean that the thin sections get enough meat on them.

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[Aaron Double]

Before trying anything tricky, try the widen module in skeinforge. just turn it on and try it again.

Aaron Double

[Michael Cook]

You can do this kind of thing in Blender, it's called extruding along
normals. I found it when I was trying to clean up a model I found, and
it worked pretty well. Here's a link on how to do it:

http://dollpartz.velcomweb.ca/tidbits.htm#en

What I ended up doing was moving the view inside the model (so I could
see what I was doing), selected everything, started the extrusion
(like the link explains), and dragged until things looked thick
enough. It took a try or two before I was satisfied, but it worked.

Alternately, you can alter the model to be solid (instead of an empty
shell) and ask Skeinforge to just print with 2 extra outlines. I've
found that works pretty well, as long as you don't expect to run into
any internal support problems.