Browsing thingiverse I came across a model for a rose and I thought “I could use that for a token for Love Letter.” I don’t need a token for Love Letter. I made affection tokens for Love Letter. I printed someone else’s affection tokens for Love Letter, and I didn’t need them. So I double don’t need to print these roses to use as affection tokens. But when I saw this rose I just had to give it a shot.
Unfortunately the mesh was a mess. It wouldn’t slice, so I ran it through netfabb and it choked. So i was going to write this off as a bad idea, that again I really didn’t even need.
However, when Andy Cohen of the 3D Printing Today podcast put out a call for a bad mesh I offered this rose up as an example that even Netfabb won’t talk to. Andy quickly ascertained that the problem wasn’t bad geometry, though it has that, too, but that the file size was simply huge because the mesh was overly complex. This happens from time to time.
Fortunately Blender has with a tool called “decimate” that will automatically reduce the amount of points with minimal changes to the mesh’s geometry. This mesh reduced down to 5% of it’s original point count without suffering much, so you know it was way too complicated to start with.
After decimating the mesh I printed out a few of them and the result is in the picture above. They look pretty good, but not great. The outer most pedals were too thin and ended up breaking off. I could go back in and edit the mesh, thicken up the pedals, but then there’s some bad geometry that I’d have to fix as well, and again it’s all for a print that I really don’t need. At this point the experiment is done, it can be made printable and it’s not so bad with supports. I’m satisfied.
However I will have a segment on the 3D Printing Today podcast about using the decimate modifier. So far I’ve recorded 3 segments for them and the first should be airing soon. With 5 kids and so many modeling projects it’s sometimes hard to find the time and the quiet, but I hope to have more segments that will help people. If there’s any segments that you want recorded, mostly about Blender tips and tricks for home 3D printing, let me know.
