here is a excerpt from a model ive made, its a sticker label that goes on a curved surface. i cant exactly remember how i modeled it but i think i just drew a side profile with the arc tool, then extruded up or something.
so, i am noticing that .obj exports are making high radius items really low poly. it makes sense, and even seeing this huge radius in shapr seems like its not proper, so im not surprised it doesnt export very clean. so, im wondering if there is a way to sort of.. get rid of this radius attribute or something, something that will help export this with the smooth curve it has in shapr. ive tried exporting to step and reimporting that step, and exporting as .obj again but i get a similar result alas slightly improved.
exporting to .stl helped retain the curve yep! but it discarded the mesh seperation in my model and the colors too… so thats kind of a dealbreaker unfortunately.
i was interested in knowing why the huge radius items were becoming low polygon in the export, and if there was a solution to fix those faces to not read as an obnoxiously large radius in shapr itself. i basically need a shapr workaround here to have it export cleanly.
i am not very comfortable with modeling in blender, and i dont want to alter the topology if i can help it
As it turns out, the angle threshold has a lower limit of 0.01, I can’t make it go any lower. Since your object is nearly flat but not quite, that angle tolerance unfortunately translates to rather large polygons.
One workaround I can see is that you scale up your part along the z axis by a certain factor, export it, and then scale it down again along that axis in your target application. Certainly not elegant, but It would result in a denser mesh.
Know your tools and their limitations to determine best fit case for your design needs.
In Blender you wouldn’t necessarily make a label as a separate item. Much easier to project a UV mapped label image to a model surface. That’s where Blender shines. And you can map to low poly items and make them “look” high poly. Blender can also work with meshes that are more like paper than Cad programs can.
The more polygons in Blender objects the more overhead in your project.
Mixing Cad objects with Blender has it’s caveats.
i wonder what the proper fix for this is however.. maybe better export optimization supporting bigger radiuses? like you said, while this fixed the issue it came with a cost of extra topology where it isnt really needed.
STL and OBJ export do the same thing, but in Shapr there are no custom resolution settings for obj exports. That’s why I showed the STL export screenshot.
Expectedly both produce the same issue with nearly flat objects. In fact I would be very surprised if they used different algorithms, the difference between an STL and an OBJ is really just metadata.
There is a STEP file import extension for blender!
I think that could potentially produce better results. Export your part as a step file and then use the blender extension to import it. It’s possible blender has better options then to avoid the issue in the conversion to a polygon object.
