Using Art of Illusion to assemble Adrian's extrider parts "tray"

[Graham Klyne]

I spent some time over the weekend playing with Art of Illusion to assemble a
"tray" of parts for printing Adrian's extruder design ... I've not yet printed
it, though. It's a bit easier than using MeshLab to do this, but not much.
Have to import each shape separately, then copy-and-paste to a common "scene".
Bunce the scene is assembled, it's much easier to arrange and align than with
MeshLab.

I'll try and get some notes in the wiki sometime.

As well as AoI itself, two plugins are needed: STL translator and solid model
editor.

I had some problems getting AoI to savethe layout directly to STL - ended up
saving first to OBJ format, then using MeshLab to load that and save it as STL.

I did have some problems getting Skeinforge to accept the output from AoI, as
the objects need to be turned into tri-meshes. See Adrian's notes in the RepRap
wiki (http://reprap.org/wiki/AoI, hint 8).

I also discovered a useful explanation by Adrian of "manifold" structures and
challenges of Boolean geometric modelling:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Separate_page_on_the_question

#g
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