Smooth and round

[Variador]

Hello,


Have used Alibre Design Personal to make items that print on an Ultimaker for over a year. Being able to print things designed in Alibre has helped me learn how to draw in 3d. The accuracy is really great.
So here's something I would like to improve. Round walls. When a circular item is printed large, 180mm by 180mm the edges are not round, they are flat potions 8.5mm wide that produce a circle. It looks round and smooth from a distance.
In Sketchup, Googles 3d printing app, there was a way to add more edges to make the circle smoother.
Searching this problem is a challenge. Round is not a word you can use.
Is there a way in Alibre (personal) to add more sides to a round object?
My next try will be to find a mesh app to smooth the sides.

Any ideas appreciated

Thanks

 

[DavidJ]

If the issue is with the 3D printed final item, then you should examine the STL export settings.

 

[johnyac]

By chance,
Did you see the posts about exposing 3d prints to acetone vapor?
http://hackaday.com/2013/03/23/smoothing-3d-prints-with-acetone-vapor/

 

[atac572]

It is most likely in the export settings. We do enormous amounts of printing and for large radii we typically use the following STL export settings:
Max Cell Size: 0.1
Normal Deviation: 5
Surface Deviation: 0

This can create fairly large STL files that will take a fair amount of time to slice but typically gives great results for large radii.

Hope that helps.

 

[Variador]

Thanks atac572


I will give those numbers a try.

 

[Variador]

Thanks atac572!


Now the prints are smooth and round. Tried but could never find anything about the parameters of cell size and the deviations. The manual only says that this is where you adjust the Stl settings.


Don