In a class I'm attending, we had homework to design a simple 4 AA battery enclosure with a USB connector. I used ViaCAD Pro 9. However, when I export to STL, I get an error message "No Mesh Objects Displayed".

What does this mean? Does this mean I can not use the "regular" blue colored solid 3D object tools to create an object, but must rather use the green colored mesh tools?

Thanks. I'm totally new at 3D printing and exporting STL files from ViaCAD Pro 9.

Any direction to tutorials, or info in this forum, for doing this would be helpful.

>> However, when I export to STL, I get an error message "No Mesh Objects Displayed".

I think some of the earlier ViaCAD versions did not recognize group solids exporting to STL. Is it possible your model is a group?

Tim

I just answered my own question.

I turned off TRANSPARENCY and now I can see the facets and triangles.

The article on Shapeways is a bit outdated. The main thing is that I do not change the Edge length. When you leave it on 0, ViaCad does automatically already a good setting. Normally I do (from the top) 0, 7- 15 (depending on the quality of the round edges), 0, 7. In the example, the edge length is 0.3, which creates so much more triangles, which is unnecessary. With complex models, they will become too big to upload and take forever to export.

That reminds me, I have quite complex models and has taken 24 minutes to export a model to STL on my MacBook Air. You always made a mistake in the design, so you can imagine that is quite frustrating. What I do now is I start my creative projects with layers for every part I'm working on. Fx with a car I put the engine on a layer, the wheels on another layer etc. Then I create layers with the same titles, but now for meshes. To distinguish them, I write them in capitals. When one part is finished, I unify the solids and set the mesh layer for that part as work layer. Then right click on the part. Then choose Change Object Type..., choose Mesh and untick Delete originals. You can now change the settings for the triangles. After clicking OK, it will have duplicated the part on the mesh layer, creating a mesh copy of it. If you later have to make adjustments, you only have to delete the complete mesh of the part and redo only the part. Calculation is quick then and exporting only takes a second, as no calculation needs to be done anymore.

The good thing of working this way is that you can define the roundness (Normal deviation) of each part, so small tubes will have different settings than large boilers. It saves incredibly on the amount of triangles and file size, important when uploading to Shapeways and get the file accepted. You have now more control over the quality of each parts for printing, instead of throwing one setting on the whole thing.

Teach yourself to work this way and you'll save yourself a lot of problems and time in the future.

This is how my layers look like:

> Train layer (folder)
- Frame (subfolder)
- Wheels (subfolder)
> TRAIN LAYER (folder with meshes)
- FRAME (subfolder with meshes)
- WHEELS (subfolder with meshes)

Hope this helps.