Eliminating unwanted internal surfaces

One of the biggest challenges with 3D-drawings is internal surfaces unintentionally formed that cause slicing not to work properly. This is using SketchUp Pro, slicing with Slic3r, and printing with a Reprap X400. Eliminating lines unnecessary to form the outside surfaces helps, but this may not eliminate all the internal surfaces which can be hard to see even with an x-ray view. It often takes deleting an external surface, looking for internal surfaces to select and delete, then adding the external surface back, being careful not to use a line that also adds the internal surface back.

This can be a huge issue when importing an STL file into SketchUP. The import seems to prefer using all triangles and thus the maximum number of lines with no attempt to see which are unnecessary, leaving it up to the user to eliminate lines.

What techniques do you have for eliminating or avoiding unwanted internal surfaces in drawings?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/15/2020 10:12AM by pvwebb.

... you can try with meshmixer and the function "make solid".

Another option with different CAD's or mesh-viewers/repair tools is to force a "manifold hull" around the object with best accuracy -- it's closing cracks/holes and averaging/smoothing small surface details, but could be helpfull with such problems.

Or in Lightview -- here it's like selecting a surface triangle, then select all connected, then make them "invisible" and see, if there are some internal wrong in place -- then I can select and delete them. If the "wrong" segments are connected with the surface too, then it's a bit more fiddling around, until getting them isolated ...

---

Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Thanks for options.

I did notice it's better to use the hide function for a surface instead of deleting it because there is no risk of unhiding adding a new internal surface.