As part of a larger project, i'm trying to print a translucent green dome. I set it up as follows:
- In Blender, create an icosphere of the maximum allowed complexity. Cut it in half and throw away one of the hemispheres.
- Duplicate the hemisphere. Move the second one down slightly and use Subtract, to hollow it out. Clean up the vertex garbage left behind.
- Export the model. Import it in the slicer, scale to the proper size, and export as gcode.
- Print the model with translucent green filament at 100% solid infill.
I ended up with a beautifully rounded dome that doesn't feel at all like a polyhedron, so that worked out fine. The only problem is, it's solid green. The filament seems to lose its translucency past a certain thickness, and the fact that my "solid" print is actually made up of thousands of tiny strings pressed up against each other probably doesn't help.
I tried reprinting it in Spiral Vase mode, and while the print turned out to be transparent, it was also extremely thin and fragile, and it failed anyway because of lack of support once the dome's angle got bad enough.
I've been trying to think of how to print this properly, but nothing I think of will work:
- Scaling can make the walls thinner, but only by reducing the size of the model. Its basic dimensions need to remain unchanged.
- Doing the same trick again that I used to create the dome, subtracting a copy of itself moved down slightly, would lead to non-uniform thickness in the model. (Which I already have some of. But when the thickness is directly correlated to the degree of transparency, this is problematic.)
Does anyone know of any tricks I can use to get it to come out properly? For reference, I'm using Blender as my 3D software, IdeaMaker as my slicer, and printing on a Raise3D N2 Plus printer.