Garden Railway Forum

Trevor Thompson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 7:57 pm These are the figures I created for my model of Welsh Pony. For 16mm scale the driver should be about 85mm tall, and the fireman about 72mm tall, smaller to take account of the crouching position. The shovel is separate.

They will print on a filament printer but obviously will be better printed on a resin printer.

The files are too big to upload (at least the system says they are) so you will have to follow this dropbox link to find them:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/krr0ip6ysr4v7 ... n.zip?dl=0

Trevor

Could you try again with a larger file, I "think" I have fixed it?

Steve

I tried after you fixed it! about half an hour ago.

It might take time for the change to be implemented. I will try again in a couple of days.

Trevor

Trevor Thompson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 7:57 pm

The files are too big to upload (at least the system says they are) so you will have to follow this dropbox link to find them:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/krr0ip6ysr4v7 ... n.zip?dl=0

Trevor I've just downloaded them from your Dropbox link.
I'm not sure exactly, but I think the reason why the forum says they are too large may be to do with the way you have zipped them?
You seem to have double zipped each file and then each one also seems to have a macos file attached which is also zipped and contains a duplicate file which won't open on a Windows m/c ( not that that is surprising of course if its a mac file).
However opening the driver file itself is a bit of a 'mare. In my slicer, the file path is showing as:
MyPC/Downloads/Driver and Fireman/Driver and Fireman/Driver.stl/Driver.stl i.e everything is twice and takes ages to open.
In addition, when I did get the driver file to open in Cura it was only 8.8mm high, not sure if that is intentional?

Edited to add that I've just taken the three unzipped files out by themselves and re-zipped them into one zip. The zipped file size is now 108.7MB compared to 124084 KB for the original download file, but it still won't upload to the forum.
The two figure files are enormous at 318,651KB and 288,664KB, and I suspect thats the real problem.

Hi

Will have another look at those files. See if I can sort out the zipping.

As for the height of the figure - yes that is how it comes out of the processing by Makehuman/blender/meshmixer. I just rescale it in the slicer.

The size of the file is huge and I will double check that but I think all of these files done that way seem huge.

Trevor

philipy wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 6:40 am

Trevor Thompson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 7:57 pm

The files are too big to upload (at least the system says they are) so you will have to follow this dropbox link to find them:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/krr0ip6ysr4v7 ... n.zip?dl=0

Trevor I've just downloaded them from your Dropbox link.
I'm not sure exactly, but I think the reason why the forum says they are too large may be to do with the way you have zipped them?
You seem to have double zipped each file and then each one also seems to have a macos file attached which is also zipped and contains a duplicate file which won't open on a Windows m/c ( not that that is surprising of course if its a mac file).
However opening the driver file itself is a bit of a 'mare. In my slicer, the file path is showing as:
MyPC/Downloads/Driver and Fireman/Driver and Fireman/Driver.stl/Driver.stl i.e everything is twice and takes ages to open.
In addition, when I did get the driver file to open in Cura it was only 8.8mm high, not sure if that is intentional?

Edited to add that I've just taken the three unzipped files out by themselves and re-zipped them into one zip. The zipped file size is now 108.7MB compared to 124084 KB for the original download file, but it still won't upload to the forum.
The two figure files are enormous at 318,651KB and 288,664KB, and I suspect thats the real problem.

I have modified the files in dropbox.

Yes the files are huge, 280 and 310 MB. Why they are so large -is beyond my current knowledge. Are all figures produced this way so large? Will look further into it.

Trevor

Trevor Thompson wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:04 pm Are all figures produced this way so large? Will look further into it.

I have sometimes seen references to "high poly" and "low poly" 3d figures. "Poly" being short for "polygons" I believe, and obviously that refers to the number of triangles or, in effect, the detail and smoothness of the end result. I'm guessing now, but 2 things spring to mind, one is that your very reasonable method of producing these figures is giving high poly results, perhaps higher than needed for this situation? ( No idea how to change th number of polys although I'm sure I've seen it as a setting somewhere, possibly in Meshmixer?). The other thing is, this amount of detail incorporated in a figure that is only 8.8mm high must take a fair bit of computing and certainly slows it down when opening in my slicer.
In effect I guess what I'm talking about is a 3d version of changing the resolution etc of a .jpg to reduce it's file size.

I have looked at a few more figures that I have created this way.

The file sizes seem to vary from about 3 to 15Mb. All been through exactly the same process as far as I can tell. They all seem to end up the same height - 8mm!

The only thing that might be different is that in mesh mixer I adjusted one of the repair settings and I suspect I have made the polygon size very small. As you say far too small - hence the large file sizes. I did that because I was struggling to get a reasonable output from it!

I will try again with those two figures.

Trevor

Trevor
Just out of curiosity I've printed your driver figure on both filament and resin machines, with interesting results. Firstly though I must say that these aren't properly cleaned up, I just roughly took the supports off and quickly sprayed with primer and haven't done any filling or anything.
The resin one seems to have undergone some sort of partial headectomy . Not sure why but I'm guessing the stand off from the raft wasn't enough to allow for the angle when printing.
Other than that, it is a much better print than the filament version. Oddly, the facets are much more obvious on the legs than the body.
There is some bridging between the right arm and the body, which is there on the stl itself and isn't a printing artefact.

The filament version suffers from holes in a mangled face, which I virtually always get when printing figures on my machine, so it wasn't a total surprise except that your one looks perfect, so it must be something to do with my slicer settings I think - what infill % and layer thickness did you use? Mine was 20% and 0.1mm.


My filament version also suffers from major yeuck on the underside of the arms, plus raggedyness at the bottom of the jacket, which I'm guessing has the same root cause.

I have to admit that I have been a bit premature in sharing these - and I really didn't intend them to raise all of these issues!

However I know about that film joining the arm to the body - I couldn't stop meshmixer doing it and I think there has to be a problem with the mesh somewhere in that area. When I printed it it fell off without much persuasion so I didn't see is a much of a problem.

I haven't tried to print these figures with my filament printer - I just assumed that if the resin printer could print them that indicated that they were solid and without mesh errors. My previous experience had led me to think that way.

The way these figures get flat planes on them is interesting. They go all the way back to makehuman and must be related to the file size there. I wonder if they can be altered? Certainly it is clear that meshmixer cant remove them it just makes the file size huge to achieve the same planes.

To show how they have worked out:
I will find the time to go back and try to improve the files! It is all a learning experience. I never would have thought I would be printing all of these people and "things" 15 months ago!

Sorry, I wasn't having a moan, I just thought it might be helpful to see my results.
I agree that 'flash' connection isn't a problem,it came off easily in the fdm version, I just didnt bother on the resin one and thought I'd point it out.

I'm not sure that my raggedy fdm results indicate mesh problems, I rather suspect my slicer settings as I said i.e infill%, wall thicknesses etc, allowing the inside to compromise the shell.

The end results on your loco look superb, I'm really envious and it just shows that your files do work. In fact my resin one is fine apart from me screwing up the position on the plate and getting him to close.