I have this sculpt and to cut a long story short I want to hollow it out so it can be filled with sand and then sealed with a rubber plug.
I’ve tried making a similar shape and subtracting with Boolean but the slice came out with holes - hard to see thickness all around of inside object.
I’ve run model through meshmixer and blender fix and hollow but the result is fully hollow and so may not be very strong.
I also cannot for the life of me get it to slice without supports going up through the hole in the base. Because the model is a shell using above method, the inside has full detail and so going inside the hole and using fill to avoid supports doesn’t work due to topology.
Am I best to just go back to sub/boolean method or is there another way?
I may have been at risk of sounding like I’m experienced as I’m not
I think I have. I’ve masked the whole object, then in mask settings set thickness to a negative number (tried variations) and then extracted with shell setting but it loses all detail.
If you’re 3D printing it, it may be worth keeping smoothing on but turning it down very low. Turning it off completely may create a lot of jagged edges and weird mesh that may not print well.
if you’re filling it with sand you could print it solid with gyroid infill (assuming fdm), gyroid would let sand flow through, you’d just need to cut a hole somewhere and glue it shut
I don’t know if I can share my dedicated tool on these forums.
It works simply, although you have to learn how to use it because it works by guessing voxel remesh. Instructions:
Duplicate the mesh.
To see what you’re going to do next, temporarily modify the preview of the two meshes. One will switch to Blending mode with reduced opacity, the other, which will form the future cavity, will switch to X-ray preview.
Apply the tool several times from the center outward of the shape. With each pass, the mesh will reduce its size. Between each pass, perform one or more simple voxel remeshes to restore the mesh, and you can also slightly reduce the number of polygons. The tool is applied several times until the desired hollow is obtained. A Boolean subtraction is applied.
I have created hollow parts for 3D printing in Nomad Sculpt using this method:
Duplicate model.
Turn on X-Ray view tool to better see inside your model.
Use Gizmo tool, and rescale duplicate of the model to be smaller than the original. This can be done by clicking on the Gizmo tool symbol in the top right menu. In the pop-down menu, there’s scaling options. You can get a precise thickness by subtracting the scale of the one you’re rescaling from the larger original.
Once rescaled, it should reduce size and the duplicate should be inside the original model (visible with X-Ray view tool). It should still be centered on the origin so long as you didn’t move it or anything.
Now go to the layers menu at the upper left side of the tool bar, and hide the duplicate model (little eyeball button to far right on the layer)
Select this hidden layer and the original you want to hollow out.
Go to the remesh tool in the same upper left part of the toolbar, and go to voxel, and set your quality settings, and then select Remesh. This should remesh the two meshes as one, and hollow the object out.
To add your plug hole, you can create a cylinder, move it to the location you want the fill hole to be, make sure it’s deep enough to create a hole through the sidewall of the hollowed object, hide it, and remesh it with the other mesh again.
I hope that helps. If I have time, I may try to grab some screenshots of the process for you. . This method always works really well for me, and once you’ve done it a couple times, it should get easier.
