CAN I PREPARE MY 3D MODELS FOR PRINTING ON AN IPAD?
When it comes to sculpting on an ipad, Forger led the way and dominated for many years until Nomad Sculpt came along with many more tools, including the ones you need to prepare a model for print.
Let’s talk about a few features you can use to get your models off your ipad and right into a slicer like Chitubox or Lychee.
Often you may need to flatten the base of your model to make sure it stands upright and well balanced. You can do this by adding a primitive shape like a cylinder or a cube to the bottom of your model, but that’s not always ideal. Nomad has a tool called Trim that literally trims away geometry that you don’t want.
Next, you may have modelled your design with no thought about what the polygon count is. When you come to export it, it may have far too many polygons for the slicing software to handle. This is where Decimation comes in. This algorithm is in most sculpting programs like Zbrush and Blender and it brings down the number of polygons using triangles. Very useful to keep the details but lower the poly count.
At some point you may want to combine several models into one welded mesh. For this we use Voxel re-meshing to merge parts together; you not only combine all of the meshes into one, but you also clean out the internal area making it a ‘watertight’ model, which is exactly how models need to be before they go to 3D print. You can’t have a model that is open at any part of the surface. The effect is pretty similar to what you get with Dynamesh in Zbrush or Dyntopo in Blender, but it’s using a grid system that is more commonly seen in voxel-based programs like Adobe Medium or 3D-coat.
Finally you may need to split off a part of the model to make it fit on a 3D printer with a smaller bed. The Split tool actually splits off any of the models that you have passed a line through. It is effectively the same as Trim, but doesn’t remove the additional geometry; it simply separates into different parts, which can be really useful for 3D printing.