Hi all!
So just 10 days ago I was posting the picture of my second ever digital sculpt, and now, after a relatively short but VERY intense self-taught session on 3D softwares and resin printing, I managed to print my first model and I’m over the moon I think for starting from absolute 0 about 3D modelling and printing, it’s a pretty good result for under 2 weeks of studying and with a little effort anyone can do it.
It’s not perfect at all since some of the supports failed and messed up some of the layers, but some light sanding managed to salvage the biggest imperfections and she will look very smooth after priming. It’s so cool to able to sculpt something on a tablet and have it in your hands just a few hours later!! For me everything was an extremely steep learning curve but after the initial headaches it’s starting to all make sense, and I can’t wait to make more (and more complex) models - the possibilities are endless!
For whoever is interested in the process since I couldn’t really seem to find all the information in the same place, here are the sofwared I used:
Sculpted entirely in Nomad
Decimated in Blender (to reduce the file size without losing the details)
Hollowed and repaired (to make sure it’s watertight) in Meshmixer
Supported and sliced in Lychee Slicer 3 Pro
Printed in Anycubic ceramic grey resin with an Anycubic Photon Mono X
Note that Nomad has a decimation tool (bottom of topology menu).
When I tested it, it usually gave slightly better result than the decimate modifier in blender (and faster). Did you have any issues with it?
Not issues but I did find the Blender one quite a bit better since it didn’t change the appearance of my model at all (and I decimated by 90% since my file was 150 MB and was aiming for 15). The Nomad one instead decreased the quality quite significantly
There’s a threshold for triangle decimation, you can get really low in vertices but at a certain point the system begins to make detail compromises, it doesn’t take too much decimate-undo to figure out where the detail is untouched but the vertice count is vastly reduced
Yeah so I went through the procedure again, I think what messed up with me when I tried the decimate function in Nomad was that I hadn’t selected the “selection only” box to export, so I got bigger file sizes for similar reductions. Redoing it now I see no noticeable differences between that and Blender, which is handy to do before exporting the file but also doesn’t change that much in the worflow since it literally took 30 secs anyways I also like that Blender is more intuitive for me when it comes to how much to decimate (e.g. you want the file to be half the size, just input 0.5 in Blender), whereas in Nomad it’s still a bit too much trial and error for my taste, unless I’m missing something
An input of 0.5 in blender is the same thing as half your object number of triangles (quads convert in triangles) divided by 2 in Nomad.
It’s probably a matter of preference.
For me there is no difference because I know what quality to expect from the final triangle count.
But the ratio is probably more intuitive for some user.
In the stats displayed on the upper left, Nomad displays the number of vertices, not the number of triangles.
For an object with only quads, there is usually the same number of quads and verts.
But for a triangular mesh, you typically get one vertex for 2 triangles.
Also, Nomad stats only displays the number of quads and triangles.
But since decimation turns everything into triangles, the total number of triangles on your input mesh is basically (triangles + quads * 2).
I think for starting from absolute 0 about 3D modelling and printing, it’s a pretty good result for under 2 weeks of studying and with a little effort anyone can do it.