Help spliting an object

[bobcoyle]

I need to split an object into part to print on a 3d printer.  Can I do this in Mesh Magic?  I can find no tutorials and nothing on YouTube to explain anything about Mesh Magic.  Please advise.  The file I have is too big to print on any printer I have access to so I need to do it in parts.  Thank you.

[Nik_2213]

Hi !

Did you manage to find a solution ?

I'm stripping lots of 'ornamentation' from a CTG sewer model to make the base modular.

Upside, MM's UI is nice, mostly intuitive. 🙂

Downside, I could not find any way for MM to select any chunk of detailed pipes, greebles etc except one triangle or face at a time. 🙁

There seems no tool for 'lassooing' stuff that's in plain sight. I fumbled my way to Boolean subtraction, which needs much better work-flow explanation. When I got that the right way around,  MM went away to rebuild the model's tree, was still working when I shrugged and stopped it.

Then I persuaded MM to split my mega-object to components. That yielded ~200+ parts, down to nuts, bolts and sewer-rusty washers.

Big stuff was easily deleted. Small stuff could be seen but, even zoomed, proved very hard to select. Again, need that 'lassoo'. I thought of using a cube and Boolean to blat a bunch, but you must select the parts to merge etc. And if I could easily select them, I wouldn't be trying this work-around...

Also, there's no list of stuff. Being able to click on a component in list, see it high-lighted on screen, then hitting delete, add to selection or whatever would solve much...

So, will your model split to components of manageable size ? Even if you must do it in stages, deleting all but a tranche then re-group those, rinse and repeat, you've a possible route to modules that will fit your printer...

N