Problem with Boolean Difference with detailed / curved objects

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have installed multiple applications to attempt to achieve my goal and have been unsuccessful so far and I'm losing hair.  Hopefully Meshmixer is the correct tool, but I keep getting errors on the Boolean Difference. Also, I am fairly new to the 3D realm but am a technical IT guy.
My goal is to take the core (middle section) of an American football model that I got on Thingiverse and perform a Boolean Difference with a team logo to make a cut out of the logo so I can print it separately and glue them together afterward.
I REALLY want to curve the logo to conform with the curvature of the football, but I could not figure that out for the life of me.  So I was just going to cut out the shape using the logo as is, but for some reason I couldn't figure out how or the methods I saw online just wouldn't work, even though they seemed so easy to do...

I also wanted to do the same thing with text (cut it out and print the text separately) and have it follow the curve of the football as well.  This would be for a name and player number.  With Sketchup, this task is called "draping" the text on the curved shape.  I couldn't even get Sketchup to load my stl files.

If there is a better application to use for this, I am all ears!

I've attached the core of the football and the team logo stl files.  The team logo needs to be scaled down and rotated to fit.  I included a screenshot of what I want it to look like in regards to positioning.  For some reason I can't get any app to simply cut the shape out of the football!

Please help!

[hfcandrew · Accepted solution]

Warping shapes to other shapes is MMs original purpose: http://help.autodesk.com/view/MSHMXR/2019/ENU/?guid=GUID-9B48D29A-C62F-4E13-8AB4-54E19F1F9875

Ironically it is the most inconsistent and frustrating tools to use.

You need to make a custom meshmix part in order to get the warping/bending of the logo accurate around the football, then separate that out make a few copies and boolean difference it against the football.

Sorry I don't have the time to write it all out, and I was gonna post a screencast of me doing it but it ended up being about 30 mins of me fiddling around and cursing MM... so I shall not be posting that.

I think there is a slight fast way of doing it using complexes but I haven't learned how to use them yet. See here for a DL link of the .mix: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m0fQBldWQ-yMxlZDesoEun2ffpcig1yV/view?usp=sharing

Read this to do the same thing with text booleaned onto a flat plane: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/meshmixer/using-stencil-for-text/td-p/8524127

[Anonymous]

I ended up just using Microsoft 3D Builder to do this and it worked fine.

The only thing I haven't looked into that I'd like to do is be able to curve a flat object to match the curvature of another object (i.e. curve the logo to fit better on the football), but that would be for a different post if I can't figure it out. Thanks for your reply however!

[hfcandrew]

The link I sent you has the logo curved to match the football. Sure let me know about the text if you get stuck.

[Anonymous]

Wow, sorry.  I totally missed that link with the curved logo.  Thanks!

I'll definitely take a deeper look at the other links on how to do this.  I'm going to do similar things for my fantasy football champions (assuming we get that far this year) and print them a personalized champs football.

And that curved logo was perfect. I'll be excited when I can do this myself!  Thank you!