Descreasing one dimension of a surface of an object by a flat amount.

[darek101TP4J2]

Dear team

I suppose the operation I am after is difficult to explain: I try to reduce the "wall thickness" of an object of mine in height by 1.5 mm while decreasing the width and thickness by 1 mm. I do not try to just change the length of my object from like 50 mm to 48.5 mm, I try to reduce every surface by that amount. So if I were to hollow my object with a wall thinkness of 1.5 mm in height and 1 mm in width and thickness, then fill that object again and attain that infill as a seperate object, then that is the object I am after. Operations that come to mind don't seem to work:

"Offset" (which additionally does not seem to work how I think it should with negative values, at -3 mm there should be holes in my object which is not the case) only works on all dimensions at the same time.

Filling after a "Hollow" command while trying to attain that infill as a separate object (if even possible) at the very least also fails because the Hollow command does not allow me to pick a dimension and changes all dimensions in the same way.

So is there a way to achieve this? If not, what is the best way to reduce by 1 mm flat in all dimensions?

[hfcandrew]

Yes all t his is possible, might need to do a series of offsets or soft transforms, or delete your targets surface and just redo it.

Hard to give specifics without the .mix...

[darek101TP4J2]

Thank you for your answer, and apologies for my late reply, I am rather busy, unfortunately.

It is a model of an ear. It's an .stl file on my laptop, I suppose that's what you are after? Thank you for looking into it.

[hfcandrew]

Ya all that is workable.

If you provide some schematics of screenshots on the dimensions you want I'll do it and send a video. This is too complex to type.

[darek101TP4J2]

Edit: I accidentally duplicated the response.

[darek101TP4J2]

What do you mean by schematics or screenshots? 3D rendered images maybe? I suppose constructing those is an equivalent problem of constructing the ear myself?

I can offer a better explanation than in my initial inquiry, however: The outer surface is to be reduced by 1.5 mm in height and 1 mm in the other 2 dimensions, width and depth.

Thank you in particular for offering to film a video for me, I think that would help me a lot, and next time I can just do it myself. I hope my explanation is unambiguous, even if not maybe you could just reconstruct what you think is correct based on the explanation? Even if you get something wrong I should be able to fix that with the help of the video. I am uncertain of how to attain the schematics you asked for.

[darek101TP4J2]

Did you get any further with your video? 🙂

[hfcandrew · Accepted solution]

So I'm still not sure what you want. Hopefully this video helps.

[darek101TP4J2]

Thank you very much! Mainly I did not know the Separate Shells command, that helped a lot! 🙂