3D mesh & Printing it

So you might be wondering why it matters to keep your 3d mesh clean, what does it even mean to keep it clean?

I tend to work on a lot of my bases in nomad sculpt. Nomad makes things really easy when you are out and about because you can do most of the work on the go on your ipad. But nomad doesn't always do the best job in keeping the meshes easy to work with.

From a quick glance you may think this mesh is ready to print, but we are far from it. Nomad can get you most of the way there but I like to go into zbrush and do mesh clean up.

Up close in nomad you can see a lot of the errors in the mesh. Granted some may not care that it looks a bit choppy but I like my mesh to flow and have a cleaner look. Plus decimating the mesh without loosing detail helps with printing. This also helps with creating parts that will fit into each other. I plan to print eyes that can easily go into the head so I want those edges clean. The base does not need to be super smooth since it will be covered in fur but I still don't want a bunch of choppy pieces.

I put the same mesh into Zbrush, run Zremesher on it with adaptive mesh and got this. I go around any edges that were chunky and smooth it out with my wacom tablet. The process is relatively quick since zbrush does all the major work. Zremesher is a fantastic button that I highly recommend anyone using if you plan to do a lot of 3d printing. This makes the mesh extremely easy to work with specially when you are looking to slice the object to print. The denser the mesh the longer the slicer such as Cura will take to read your file and longer to print.

I slice the back of my suit heads but nomad makes those edges very dirty even when you remesh in the app. No matter if you do voxel re mesh or subdivisions it will never come close to zbrush remesh button.

Clean up is key specially if you want that mesh to print well. Look at the difference between the raw nomad mesh and the zbrush cleaned up mesh.

The antlers were so chunky around the egdes I needed to clean this up before making and internal cut out. The way these currently looked was not going to work for me.

Once cleaned up it was a lot easier to create the cut out and get a much cleaner overall look for the antlers. This way if I wanted it to be an even higher res I would just divide the mesh to get more "information" on the mesh making it smoother.