can I reverse-engineer a Voronoi object?

[Anonymous]

What I'd like to do is take an STL of a Voronoi shape and generate  a thin "shell" of the original object, ending up with an object which still has the Voronoi pattern but with a "lining" rather than open-air.  Final product similar to voronoi-tea-light-shade-36071 at myminifactory.  

To be clear -- I don't have the original shape, just Voronoi STLs from various online archives. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

A possible workflow depends much on the overall shape of the voronoi object:

If it's convex  all over (like an egg) or convex and planar (like a cylinder) e.g:

- SelectAll (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A on MAC)

- Run Edit/FitPrimitive and set its PrimitiveType to ConvexHull (CreateNewObjects checked)

- Run MakeSolid on this hull object and set its SolidType to Accurate. Accurate enables the OffsetDistance slider. Pull it down a bit and hit update. You want to get a result intersecting but showing the voronoi object. If needed adjust the offset. Finally accept.

- Now activate both the voronoi and the MakeSolid result and run BooleanUnion

- Show the FitPrimitive object again (MakeSolid did hide it before) and run MakeSolid again in Accurate mode. Now set a slightly bigger offset as you did before. The difference will determine the "lining's" thickness. Accept

- Activate the BoolleanUnion result first and the last MakeSolid result and run BooleanDifference to get a hollow object. You might use another intersecting object to bool-off an opening the bottom.

Harder but doable with a different workflow on an voronoi object owning concave regions...