However, “Close Holes” seems to be designed for topology defect “holes” and not for “RC didn’t detect any features on that surface, so it’s got going to make a mesh there”. Or, at least, that’s how it seems to work in my trials. It seems to close holes to make a watertight model, but wouldn’t close the hole in a doughnut.
I have tried MeshMixer with limited success. I like the ease of use and functionality; however, combining of the meshes for export doesn’t work well for me. Sculpt tools don’t quite work on my geometries and adding surfaces for closing holes results in weird shapes.
For example, I start with box full of holes:
Then add a surface to cover the holes:
Then perform “Make Solid” to combine the two components and it totally messes up the box. Like this:
Maxing out settings for Make Solid seems to help a bit, but not all the way.
Have you seen anything like this and/or know how to deal with this issue?
Don’t use the ‘make solid’ command, unless you’re looking to make a watertight part for 3dprinting. The process smooths out the resultant geometry for me too much (loosing a lot of smaller details), or it takes forever at super high qualities.
Does the “Analysis > Inspector” tool not fill all the holes using the “Auto Repair All” button?
And what do you mean by “combining meshes for export don’t work for me”?
Analysis > Inspector > Autorepair was the first thing I tried after reading around
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to fix the holes in the model above. I’m guessing because those aren’t really “holes” in the sense of a geometry problem. The geometry is technically fine. You can see below that “Inspector” doesn’t identify those as holes (the pink lines point to some other floating pieces) :
Unless there’s some setting which I’m missing…
That’s why I had to add another object to cover those holes. The objects have to be “made solid”, otherwise Meshmixer exports those as two groups and RC doesn’t seem to want to import those.
Tim, you’re right. Those are not technically holes. If you were to look inside the object, you’d see a lot of extra geometry, which connects everything together.
You can check in MeshMixer by doing a “Edit > plane cut”, which will allow you to “see inside” the geometry.
If that’s the case, I would clean up the extra unwanted internal geometry so that you’re left with actual “holes” on the outter surface. Those holes can then easily be filled by a flat fill.
To accomplish this cleanup (and see inside), your best bet is to split the object into two using the Edit > Plane Cut tool, with the cut type set to “Slice (keep both)” and fill type to “No Fill”. This will slice the model whereever you placed the cut plane.
Then go to the “Select” menu, and double click on one of the two halves, then press “Y”. This will separate that portion into it’s own object, which can now be hidden (by clicking the eye in the “Object Browser” window)
Once you’re done cleaning, multiselect all the objects in the Object Browser, and select “Combine”.
The problem is not the holes, but the bumpy geometry that in reality isn’t there. Worst of al are intersecting surfaces.
Tim, have you not seen the awesome interioirs that have been discussed recently?
I wonder if it would be much quicker fpr you to basically reconstruct the whole container as one big cube. The details will be lost to some degree but I figure it’s not so much about those, right?
I tried replacing the whole thing with one big cuboid, but the texture didn’t place correctly. The problem is that I have a number of such areas to fix. But drawing from scratch might be faster than dealing with all the holes individually.
