I’ve tried Sculptris, Netfabb and Meshmixer. Had very iffy results, although to be honest I was shooting for specific mesh modifications that had to be clean of non-manifold edges and self-intersections. It really made a mess and I wound up taking it into Rhino and doing it manually. Maybe in this case they would work better, but I’d be afraid they would introduce some weird results if not used correctly. (For that matter, F360 and Rhino might as well.) I hate messing with meshes.
F360 has a sculpting option that I’ve been wanting to play with. It’s a separate section from the regular sketches and geometry. It might actually work all right for this. It looks easy enough to use from the vids, but I haven’t had a chance to get into anything specific yet.
You might be right that Blender is the best choice though. (Never tried it.) It’s another option.
I agree, most of these editors were made for modeling with digital rendering as the desired end result, not for making an actual physical object, so they all seem hell-bent on putting holes in the mesh or flipping faces.
Best bet of course would be to get the original model and purchase Zbrush. (I looked at that once tho and seem to recall it being teeth-grindingly expensive.)
123D Make morphed into Slicer for Fusion. (Same program, although the new one has a lot more capabilities. Not necessarily a good thing, it’s harder to use.)
Slicer for Fusion 360 will do the exact chopping of cardboard you are asking for.
Zbrush still not cheap but if it’s just one sasquatch face you need to modify the 30 day free trial is plenty of time. Warning: it’s not like any other 3D program, totally different interface and tools. Do go through at least an intro tutorial or you’ll go mad!
So, just an update, I have made a trade deal with a good Zbrush modeler. He’s working on a good sasquatch for me. Next I’ll have to try figuring out just how to do the slicing thing. Starting to save up a pile of useful cardboard at work.
I’ve not tried it personally, but I’d think the open-source Slic3r utility should be worth checking out. It claims to ingest STL/OBJ meshes and output SVG files.
Unless you’ve already devised a method, some sort of layer registration may be needed before generating the SVG slices. This way, the Glowforged layers drop onto a peg and are aligned perfectly.
Slicr has several options to do exactly this, as well as label your layers, create assembly instructions and optimize/estimate part-layout-on-material :). There are even several cardboard types in the default material library. Not bad for free.
Good isn’t it? (I want to be able to design one like that one day.)
