Hi folks, after a long absence from 3d printing due to other projects (my family and I are renovating an old Danish farmhouse) I found some spare time to be creative with Nomad Sculpt at last. But when I tried to print my sculpts, my printer suddenly started to fail - literally from one day to the next. Gaps and holes appear in the printed models, supports are fused into solid rectangular blocks that engulf details of the models. Has anybody of the kind folks in there encountered similar problems, and did you find a way to deal with them? I would be so glad for any help. Thank you very much in advance, Richard from RCStudio
Never, but seeing the images seems some option of the slicer for the supports, check z-lift option or something related to the position from the bed
Hej Josepmy, many thanks for your reply! In a long process yesterday evening I could at least rule out that my printer is damaged by printing a rather complicated different model (with many surface angles and textures) without any fails.
So it seems to be a mix of problems caused by the models themselves and the slicer. A problem of the model may be that the pants and the shirt were not original sculpts but .glb-files I had acquired, converted into .stl-files and refitted to my figurine sculpt. Perhaps the conversion from glb to stl doesn’t work so well, or (more likely …) I made mistakes by reworking these files.
After discovering that my printer seems to be not at fault I prepared the model of the figurine anew in another slicer (Photon Workshop 3.1.4), ran the slicer’s repair tool just to be on the safe side, repositioned the model on the plate in a steeper angle, resupported it and sliced it, resulting in a printing time of more than twice the amount of time it needed when I had sliced it before with Lychee. I ran the print during the night, and it came out allright! Now I will do this with the model of the submarine.
So while I still don’t know the reason for the failed former printing attempts and can’t give real advice to anyone who encounters the same problems, at least now I have a print I can work with. Your advice to reposition the model on the bed must have a lot to do with solving the problem, anyway, so thanks again for that! It’s really great to know that kind and resourceful people like you read this forum and offer advice. You are a very good person.
Thanks and have a good time, with best wishes from Denmark,
Richard
Maybe and easy test is to join the part remesh it, check manifold and close holes on nomad. You will explain how it ends later, I’m intrigued. 
This is the uncured model fresh from the washing, blemishes and minor damages not yet taken care of. It is a 1/24 figurine of the race car driver Sir Henry Birkin, sculpted from scratch from some photos of Sir Henry. I created the figurine as a supplement to the successful Revell and Heller 1/24 scale model of the Bentley Blower, a car which Sir Henry drove exclusively and rather famously. I hope that race car modelers who like to build small dioramas around their models may want the figurine to accompany their Bentley Blower exhibit.
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I just realised that my description of how I could solve the problem somehow didn’t get through to the forum. Maybe I deleted it by mistake when I tried to attach the photos to the message with the description. So here I try again, maybe it will help somebody with a similiar problem in the future.
- I repaired the model in Photon Workshop and saved the repaired version.
- I openend the repaired version in Lychee and repaired it again.
- I supported the newly repaired version of the model in Lychee and saved the supported version as an .stl-file.
- I opened the -stl-file in Photon Workshop and - yes, you knew it! - repaired it again.
- I sliced the supported and now thrice repaired model in Photon Workshop.
- I whooped with joy when after nearly 6 hours of printing I discovered that the print came out ok this time.
Best wishes, and thanks again for your support, Josepmy!
Richard
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Hey, glad you solved and fixed it, the model looks great. It’s weird that the exported STL from Nomad needed so many repairs. How you exported? Join or remesh? You checked manifold and holes?
Not meaning to hijack, but how do you check manifold in Nomad? I usually have to take into a second software to check.
Hej Josepmy, thank you for your reply. In fact, I just joined the parts of the 3D-model, because it was too big for my old iPad’s rather limited memory to have it voxel merged in the necessary resolution via a boolean operation. (Every 3D-model I create in Nomad with a total size of over 150 MB crashes my iPad, and there’s a limit to decimation to make it smaller as the model begins to loose precious details after a few decimation runs.) I exported the joined model as an stl-file to my mac and then checked for manifolds and holes in Meshmixer. I could not repair all the manifold problems, but I could fill in all the holes. After that operation, I started to juggle the file between Photon Workshop and Lychee as I described.
You know, I am beginning to suspect that I fail to know some crucial steps that could be taken within Nomad … maybe I should repeat the Nomad course I bought from SouthernGFX when I started sculpting …
And, @RogerRoger , you are highly welcome in this thread! Thanks for your question! As you can see, I am having the same issue.
Best wishes to both of you,
Richard
I’m just curious - I don’t print in 3D myself.
But I would really like to know what effect this very high polycount (150 MB file) has on the print result.
I searched for a printable figure on Sketchfab - The Mandalorian - Star Wars 3d printable model - Download Free 3D model by Printed Obsession (@printedobsession) [7a88a01] - Sketchfab
Filesize 5.3MB
I had a look at the figure in Nomad Sculpt in wireframe / smooth shading off -
I can’t really imagine that :
with a print size of 10cm really big differences in detail to your figure are recognizable. Will this figure be printed less accurately?
I mean 5MB to 150MB, so the level of detail should be 30 x higher.
I also downloaded a few figures from Printables that had a polycount of around 200000 - do these figures print badly?
Have you already tried what the lowest polycount for printing is?
I realize that if the figure were 180cm tall, the facets would be clearly visible - but with small figures?
I mean, if you want to print a figure about 10-15 cm tall - why do you need mesh details for skin pores, for example? I can hardly recognize the pores on my real skin in life size.
What do you actually need a multi million polycount for?
Great made model !
Remember that it’s not the 3D printer that would ever choke on a 150MB STL. The slicer is given the parameter of the printer it’s slicing for. If a 150MB file containing pore-level skin detail is fed to the slicer software, I don’t believe that each slice prepared for projection carries through that pore detail if told to slice for a 5cm model on a typical desktop 3D resin printer.
As I recall, almost all of my ChiTuBox printer-ready files came in significantly under the original STL fed into it.
Nothing wrong with keeping a version with 150MB worth of details, that only provides a safeguard option to print a huge ¼ scale version down the road. Having said that, it does sound quite massive a (STL) file size to me. For a 10cm printed target, the pixel size of the projector (typically 28-50 microns) is the limiting factor that prevents facial pores from being resolved. 150MB would also be the “master” version for changing/adding details later.
Hej Holger, hej CarterTG, many many thanks for your thoughts and questions. I guess I am doing something wrong when sculpting - but what?
I always assumend that even when printed in a very small version where the layer height (I print in 34 um on an Anycubic Photon M3Plus) decides about which details can be printed and which will disappear, a higher detailled texture would mean a clearer printed model and easier painting afterwards.
When I sculpt a model that requires a high level of details, like a face, I do it as follows: I make a rough first draft that catches the overall features, decimate the triangles as far as possible, then go over the areas that need details with Dyntopo, sculpt these areas, decimate again, re-sculpt again and so on until I have a sculpt that looks as detailled as I wished it to be.
And most of the time I get a whopper of a file that in some cases can’t even be merged with the rest of the model because the sum of all the parts together crashes my iPad. Sometimes I can’t even trim these files, so I have to go back to the drawing, so to say, and re-sculpt or split my model into two or more parts to get more manageable files.
With the head of the Henry Birkin model I had to sculpt the the head separately from the racing helmet he’s wearing because together both files were too big to be handled.
Until now I assumed that the problem was my old iPad with a too small memory for 3D sculpting. You lead me to suspect that the problem is not the iPad but its owner … as so often is the case.
Let me show you some examples:
This is the head of the model. You can see that only the important areas of the faces have a high polygon count. In this state, the file has 73,6 MB. And this is only the head!!
This is how the face looks when decimated to a more manageable 6,2 MB (which still is very - too - high, as I deduct from your replies). The important details are all gone now.
Is there a way to reduce the file size without losing important details? Do I do something wrong from the start and create an unnecessary polygon count?
I would be so glad if you could set me on the right track there, because very often sculpting is a struggle for me and a fight against iPad crashes and unwielding files.
Thank you so much in advance,
Richard
By the way, @Holger_Schoenischka , I have just subscribed to your youtube-channel. Thanks for making so many tutorials! I am looking forward to browse through them.
Best wishes,
Richard
One thing about 3D printing would also interest me:
Why not use separate objects for details ?
With a head, the hair for the eyebrows / or the beard can still be individual tubes - can’t they ?
Wouldn’t Mesh 1 be printed in exactly the same way as Mesh 2?
Or this example:
Would Mesh 1 - absolute low poly be printed worse than Mesh 2 - voxel remeshed version of mesh 1.
I also import my sculpts into Meshmixer and check for manifold, but usually only after my slicer says the model has issues. For me, nomad only seems to have issues after certain Boolean/Voxel Remeshing operations in combination with Decimating afterwards.
As mentioned above, you should be able to decimate your model a lot before printing as the likely hood of some of the small details won’t show up during printing at your scale.
One tip for decimation: auto-decimate it to a level where it’s still holding details that will still show up when printed. Then, use the smooth tool with the strength turned down to 0 and the Dyno-Topo turned to a level where it will reduce your poly count fairly well. Brush the areas you can take more detail out and the areas you want to leave detail will remain higher definition.