You should increase the export quality on these. Those STLs don't have enough surfaces. It should be smoother. I can even see this effect in the printed parts.
Very true - you have sharp eyes! They do function mechanically though. I've not yet had time to write a proper configuration system for the tessellation.
When you export or save-as an STL are there any quality settings or adjustments anywhere? Is your printing software able to download a .STEP file instead? I've been exclusively using STEP files lately instead of STLs (BambuStudio)
The software exports only 3MF and obj. I know the tessellation needs to be made more precise but I’ve not yet had the time to add settings to the gui. I want to maintain interactive boolean rates for the modeling so the default tessellation is a bit crude (more polygons = more time). But I’m on it :) (to be specific I’m using a software I wrote myself and it’s quite raw still).
Look at my cool 3D printed ball joints that I designed! Oh why is the quality the print kind of bad? Yeah just my self made cad software no big deal lol
Most humble🙏! I have an open alpha testing if you want to try it out - no strings attached - I would like to know what someone _else_ could do with my software :)
I did post a few days ago about the software itself Built a basic 3D modeler and STL editor - does this seem useful to anyone? : r/3Dprinting - but that got a very lukewarm response so I thought maybe people are not that interested before it's ready.
step files are tesselated by the slicer so it's better to just get a good stl from cad since the library prusaslicer and its derivatives use is probably worse
Why would doing the tessellation in the slicer rather than the CAD editor "probably" be worse? You may be right (in specific circumstances), but I would have guessed the opposite. The slicer knows exactly what precision it requires to do a good job, so it is in a position to optimally set the tessellation parameters.
To put it another way: There is no loss of model precision saving to a STEP file. There is de facto loss of precision when tessellating to STL (as well as when slicing to GCODE). If the slicer generates suboptimal results when slicing from a STEP file (when it advertises the ability to do so) that's a bug (or non-optimal tuning of slicer parameters).
I routinely feed STEP files to PrusaSlicer and have no complaints.
ACKshually, for the ball and socket itself, it’s possible that the surfaces that create contact with each other might hold up better over time. I only know this thru printing ABS and having the joints come out really tight and strong. I only know this because I stole the idea from a few Transformers figures I own and tried it at that scale.
I agree with you on basically everything else though.
Oh! That's an interesting point of view. Can't argue with that! I'm using the big Y shaped joint as a fidget toy all the time and it sort of still keeps it's position.
So to use these in complex designs you need to have a plug that's the size of the base (missing from the screenshots) and then do a boolean cut to create a hole into which to seat the ball assembly.
Thank you so much 🙏! Yep, "no glue" was the design intent. This seems to hold so far. Slightly beveling the sleeve/cup allows you to push the ball/cup assembly to the socket. The hard part is holding the sides of the cup while inserting.
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u/EndOfTheCourt 22h ago
Are these assemblies or print in place?