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shrinkwrap an imported stl with "surface subset"

ptc-2397885
1-Newbie

shrinkwrap an imported stl with "surface subset"

Could anyone outline the process between opening an stl, and beeing able to save it as a shrinkwrapped stl , with "surface subset" I have recieved a mesh consisting of thousands unconnected open edged intersecting shapes. It was made in 3D max and it's all triangle data, no nurbs. but not a point cloud either. So i can save it as STL or OBJ or another triangle based format. the overall piece is in fact beautifully modelled, and the outside appearance has to remain unchanged. So I need to produce one watertight mesh that exactly duplicates the appearance of the original. This for milling and 3D printing purposes. the "surface subset" shrinkwrap feature seems to describe exactly what I need. So, I tried toopen the .STL, i do "save a copy">shrinkwrap but "surface subset" doesn't give me any results, the whole piece is colored orange, signifying that no surfaces are beeig exported. "faceted solid" does produce a file, but it's very simpified. So i'm a total newbie in this and what kinds of surfaces and shapes and states Pro/E has, but could anyone outline the process between opening an stl, and beeing able to save it as a shrinkwrapped stl , with "surface subset" I have tried some remeshing/shrinkwrapping/shellgeneration software, which creates more points for less detail. this remeshing trick however is the only way i've found so far that creates a closed shell, too bad it's too ugly to be used. there are thousand of open edges etc, any manual approach is futile, it has to be fully automatic.
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1 REPLY 1

The first step is to open and save your .stl file as a regular Pro/E part (.prt file). There's no point saving your .stl as a shrinkwrap. The purpose of the shrinkwrap is to simplify a model into a surface or merged solid. Yours is already surface-faceted. After taking your .stl file into the Pro/E world, you could use the Import Data Doctor (IDD) interface to close the gaps between the facets and come up with one clean closed quilt. IDD is poweful and easy to use in Wildfire 4.0 The other option I can think of is using the Reverse Engineeering Extension (REX) to convert a faceted model into a single clean surface. Both IDD and REX require additional license options (add-ons) that would have to be purchased, if you don't already have them.
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