Eliminating seams and wrinkles at 60

[Anonymous]

  Hello, I am a 60yo newbie trying to figure out how to close seams and what ever I have done wrong with an stl file.

I am trying make watertight and to eliminate a seam in a model that was created after transforming the top half only of the model.  It is a model of my 31 Ford with a chopped top and when I get the dimensions right I am left with a seem that shows up in the

milling and cant figure out how to fix it.  I hope that someone has some idea of what I did wrong.

[nkloski]

There are seams everywhere, you're right!  First you can try Edit --> close cracks, though that only fixes a couple of problems in your model, and barely fixes it.  This model has an internal area with a steering wheel, gearshift, etc. and was likely created in a 3D modeling program NOT for 3D printing.  Fixing it will take time, and probably require you to "separate shells" to separate all disconnected components into their own body.  Then sort logical pieces into groups and "make solid" those groups, then try and recombine...but in my experience, models with complex internal geometry, not designed for 3D printing, are time consuming to get 3D printable.

[hfcandrew]

Unfortunately it is not possible to easily make this 'watertight' aka 'solid'. If you go EDIT>SEPARATE SHELLS, there are 103 disconnected meshes and seams to connect. So hours and hours of work.

Those seams going along the window are caused by non-manifold (overlapping) triangles. Hit 'W' to view them.

This model was not made for any 3D or milling purpose and was not optimized at all for its BREP to mesh conversion.

Read here about meshes.

However some milling software can smooth over this.

What material are you trying to create this with?

What kind of CNC are you using?

3 or 4 axis?

What CAM software are you using?

[Anonymous]

Besides the open cracks: Somebody modified the original model's height by doing a horizontal selection and moving the car's roof towards its bottom. This results in those duplicated non manifold areas. You can see this at the steering wheel or the profiles around the rear-side windows... This is hard to repair. If you did this modification using SELECT/Deform/Transform you should go back to its original height and use SoftTransform instead.

[hfcandrew]

I ran a quick toolpath sim of one side using Deskproto and it had no issues with the meshes on the model. So depending on your CAM, potentially no need for any clean up in MM.