From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

Fixing easy printability problems - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

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Fixing easy printability problems

- First off, let's talk about fixing some of the easy problems with scans. Then, in the next video, we'll go into more difficult ones. To fix easy problems, first off start by going to Analysis to Inspector. As I said in my intro video, there's some easy things to fix and some hard things to fix. The easy ones are these little floating pieces. Click on those to get rid of them. Then, the small holes, so you can see this pin goes to a small hole, click that. And some other holes here that are also easy to fix. Now, this one pin goes to the overall object. That's very difficult to fix, so we won't do that in this video. In this case, as with most of the scans you'll be doing with 123D Catch, or even professional scanners, you may get some objects outside of that which you wanted to scan. In this case, I'm going to hover my mouse here and press the C key for center, and zoom in. I only cared about this little hole here and the wire coming out. I didn't actually care about the camera, or anything. As you see, I didn't get a whole lot of information there, so the scan wasn't very good. I only cared about this one little part. What I'm going to do is go in to click Select with a good brush size. I'm going to press the left bracket key to make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to go in and just start painting with the Unwrap brush, let me go in back to Select with Unwrap Brush. I'm going to start painting right here, and selecting around the place that I wanted. I don't need to be too accurate. Just select around where I wanted. Now, I want to invert this, I want to select everything except for the parts that I wanted. I'm going to go up here to Modify, to Invert, or just press the I key to invert. That selects everything else. I'm going to press the Delete key on my keyboard, or under Edit, you can go to Discard or X. What that does is it gives me a nice, kind of zoomed-in view of just the place that I wanted. Now, this still isn't the best selection in the world, so I can do a few different things. If you have a more complex selection in your own object, what you can do is go to Edit, to Plane Cut, and just draw a line where you want your object to be cut. I'm going to cut it there and say Accept. Going to go back into Plane Cut and draw a line right above this, like that. You see it selected the other side, so I'm going to hit this arrow that appears to switch. Click Accept, so that's nice. This gets a little tricky, this corner, because it's at a right angle to this other one, so I'm going to Plane Cut right here, and again it selected the wrong side, so I'm going to click on that. That's looking a little bit better. I'm going to Plane Cut on the bottom. Like that. If I can get a good view here, I can get a Plane Cut down the side. This gives me a nice even set of lines to work with. I could even cut it a little bit here if I wanted to, but this is a very good start to how you would fix printability issues. This is still one-sided. You still see that this has a blue line around it, but it's a lot easier to fix something like this than it is with the larger scene. In the next video, we'll go back and look at some harder problems to fix, but this is kind of the easy way. In general, you select what you want, delete everything else, and then make the edges a nice, even line so that you can extrude them later. I'll talk about that in the next video, after the next one where we talk about more difficult problems to deal with.

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