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bergerud
07-16-2009, 02:46 PM
As my first trial of the STL importer, I found a (poor quality but free) 3d football on the web. Converted it from .3ds to .stl and imported it into the STL importer. Scaled it to be 4 X 0.75 in the z direction, sliced four times - done. Unbelievably fast and efficient compared to slicing in a program like 3ds max. Now in designer, I put the four slices on a board and carved. This was a mistake. The carvings pierced only in a few places and I had to cut out the pieces by hand. First lesson learned the hard way. (The only way I learn!) I think we always want to use best bit optimization in multiple carvings to keep the object geometry consistent. The problem is that this conflicts with the piercing. Piercing will not occur if the sides are sloped greater than the carving bit angle. It is essential to create (as in the demo), a pierced carve region around the pieces (and tabs). This is easily done by using outline patterns, carve region, resize, and pierce.
Gluing is a little tricky, but this is the subject for another day. I have included the carving file after I fixed it as well as a version which makes a hollow football. (Sorry- hollow version file size too large for the forum.) I have not carved either of these so ??? (I have carved a hollow ellipsoid which worked great.) ALSO I have included the football.stl file but I had to add the file extension .mpn to fool the forum upload. YOU HAVE TO DELETE THE .mpn EXTENSION.

Could someone get the webmaster to add .stl file extensions and increase some of the file size limitations?

I must say that I like the STL converter. It makes fast work of the slicing problem. I have used 3ds max before to slice it was not easy. I am happy to have the process automated. The price is steep for the amount of "software" we are getting, but remember, we are a small market. If you do buy it, it will, like the pattern editor, be part of your system forever

joesighting
07-24-2009, 03:24 PM
Cool footbal! Looking forward to see what else you build!