I took a small detour from Mendel reproduction to explore printing
Moustaches (I am participating in
Movember). I first
made a design that works very well for a larger Moustache but started to behave strangely in RepSnapper as I scaled it down. The slices would start getting too small and the part would have huge steps.
So I tweaked my design and made a
second version that worked a little better (more rounded points and slightly better geometry). RepSnapper still had problems with strange layers with this version.
I ultimately made a
third version with simpler geometry. This version worked very well for small Mo's (2nd-3rd image below) but RepSnapper did something even stranger on the versions with holes for a necklace cord or key chain (top two).
The geometry is just chopped at the hole.
I took the STLs into MeshLab and did some smoothing and face re-simplification and was able to get something that did not have sharp corners and prints well in RepSnapper (even with the holes - see bottom two images above). It is probably time to start learning how to use something more robust than RepSnapper (like Skienforge...)
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