Need help adding thickness to sculpted body

[Anonymous]

Hi!

I'll start by saying, I'm self-taught and picked up bits and pieces of knowledge from the Academy of YouTube, so there's a 110% chance I'm doing plenty of things wrong!

I'm mostly done sculpting this model, but I need to add thickness to the shell and make it watertight (for 3d printing later). Ideally, I'd be aiming for something like a 10mm shell, but whatever I try, I'm not able to thicken this thing, and every attempt throws an error.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[dmorse]

Have you tried closing the shape to create a solid, and then attempting a Shell command? Just a thought at a different approach.  It's hard to tell why the error is being produced, without seeing the entire model. If you can upload the file, or more screen-shots, it may be more revealing.  

[Anonymous]

@dmorse Thanks for the advice. Just to take a shot at the Shell command, I did go ahead and try patching/stitching the body to make a solid. Unfortunately, Shell gave nothing but errors, regardless of the thickness I specified. Here is a link to the model, feel free to tear into it. 

http://a360.co/2tWNwOh

FWIW, scaling up and then using the Thicken command did ultimately succeed. I could then scale it back to the original size and the proportional thickness was retained. It was strange to see that a workaround like that was necessary to get the expected results. 

EDIT: Sorry, this somehow became a duplicate thread. Solutions were also discussed HERE.

[dmorse]

I was able to successfully patch and stitch. Then, using Shell using outside offset worked. Inside offset did not work.

[cekuhnen · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous @dmorse

First for offsetting this is an incredibly difficult set of surfaces.

Second Fusion offset/shelling is focused on being precise which can sometimes also result into issues.

It is a common strategy in such situations to offset only the needed surfaces (ignoring A surface fillets) inwards

if needed overbuild and then trim the B surfaces

This means you build the thickness by hand. For interior surfaces there is most times no need for fillets so you can

work with sharp edges which will simplify the tasks significantly.

later create the surface that connects the A and B surface and stitch everything together.

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

Did you solve the thickening issue?

[Anonymous]

@cekuhnen - Yes. This thread was duplicated by mistake, and suggestions were made on the other thread that got me about as close as I can hope to be for the purpose of thickening. I'm still going to have issues down the road with this model, but the solutions proposed for this issue seem to work, albeit tediously.