Working with meshes

A mesh is a shape made of many small flat triangles: what a 3D scan, a model download (Printables, Thingiverse), a sculpting app or the body generator gives you. In Solid Vibes a mesh becomes a mesh body — one step in your recipe that you can still resize, reshape and get ready for printing with Mesh tools.

Bring a mesh in

Press ⌘K → Import a mesh (STL, OBJ, 3MF, GLB)…, or simply drop the file on the editor. Solid Vibes reads it and repairs it on the way in, and tells you what it did in plain words, for example:

• Closed 3 holes
• Removed 2 loose bits
• Turned 120 flipped triangles the right way
• Merged 4 overlapping parts into one (eyes pushed into a head, a model exported as separate shells)
• Rebuilt the surface to make it watertight (when a file is too broken to fix directly)
• Simplified 157,000 → 20,000 triangles (so editing stays quick)

The body lands in the empty piece you're in, or as a new piece next to your model. It's centred, standing on the print bed, in millimetres (a GLB in metres or a tiny STL is converted), with width / length / height sliders to resize it. The Recipe shows it as Imported mesh body “dragon.stl”.

Generated bodies (see Turning a concept into a detailed 3D body) are mesh bodies too: everything below works on them the same way.

Mesh tools

Open them with ⌘K → Mesh tools…, by right-clicking the body (the ring shows Mesh tools, Shape slider and Hollow, or Shape slider here, Smooth here and Pocket on the spot you clicked), or from the body's ⋯ menu in the Recipe. The card lists the tools on the body in the order they run — each with what it did, a pencil to change it, an eye to turn it off and a bin to remove it. Every change is one step you can undo.

Tools that change the shape (smooth, shape sliders, make symmetric, even out) run first, on the body as it is; tools that make it printable (cut flat, thicken, hollow, pockets, split) run after the size sliders, in real millimetres — so a 2 mm wall stays 2 mm when you resize the body.

Classic features still work on top: a flat base so it stands, holes and cuts from sketches, bosses, raised or engraved text on a flat face.

Shape sliders: "make the neck longer"

A shape slider is a box of control points (a cage) around part of the body. Move the points and everything inside bends smoothly with them. You don't have to move points yourself: pick what should happen and the slider does it.

1. Click the part you want to change (the neck), then choose Shape slider… (or right-click → Shape slider here). With nothing clicked, the slider covers the whole body.
2. Give it a name (Neck length) and say what it does: Stretches (longer or shorter — what's beyond it, like the head, moves along), Grows (bigger or smaller, by 1.2 = 20 % bigger), Moves or Bends, in a direction (up, forward, sideways).
3. Set Region size so the box covers just that part. The coral ball in the view shows it.

It becomes a slider in Parameters (group Shape). Drag it and the body changes; it rebuilds in well under a second on a 20,000-triangle body. You can add as many as you like (Head size, Tail length…).

To fine-tune by hand, click the grid icon on the slider's row in Mesh tools: the control points appear in the view (coral = the ones the slider moves). Click a point and type how far it moves.

You can also just ask the agent:

Make the neck longer

It looks at the body, puts a Neck length slider around the neck and tells you its name. "Make the head 20 % bigger" or "a longer tail" work the same way. It never rebuilds or regenerates the body for a proportion change.

Split it to fit your printer

Mesh tools → Split checks the body against your printer (the one you chose for printing, or a 256 mm printer if you haven't) and suggests the fewest cuts that fit, each placed where the cut is smallest. Or pick a cut yourself (across the height, length or width, at a position).

• Pins (default): pins on one part and matching holes with 0.2 mm clearance on the other. The pins come in two sizes, so the parts only fit together one way. On a hollow body, solid bosses are grown around each pin.
• Dowel holes: holes on both parts for separate dowels (wooden or steel pins).
• None: glue the flat faces.

Each part becomes its own piece (Dragon · part 1, part 2), in place in the assembly and glued to the first, and is laid flat on its cut for printing in Make. A flat base stays only on the part that has the bottom. See Split a part to fit your printer for gluing and finishing tips.

Printing a mesh body

• Hollow big prints. 2 mm walls work for FDM and resin; resin needs at least one drain hole of 3 mm or more near the bottom, two if the body is long.
• Thin bits (ears, fingers, spikes) under about 1.2 mm may not print in FDM: Thicken thin fixes them, or print in resin.
• Bumpy scans smooth out with Smooth at 0.3–0.6. The smoothness check says when a body is bumpy all over.
• Too big? Split it. Each part exports as its own closed STL or 3MF (Make → Export → Pick pieces).

Limits

• Mesh bodies have no sculpting cage: Sculpt says so and opens Mesh tools instead. Shape sliders, smoothing and make symmetric are the ways to reshape them.
• A body is kept in the design itself (no separate file), so it's limited to about 80,000 triangles; imports are simplified to 20,000.
• STEP files are solids, not meshes: they open as solids. Colours and textures in OBJ, 3MF or GLB files aren't kept.
• Hollowing a 20,000-triangle body takes a few seconds; most other tools take well under a second.

For CAD users: repair = weld, orientation fix, small-shell removal, hole filling (ear clipping), Manifold union of overlapping shells, voxel remesh as the fallback; Smooth = Taubin λ|μ; Even out = isotropic remeshing (split / collapse / flip / tangential relaxation, projected back); shape sliders = free-form deformation (a Bernstein lattice, 3 × 3 × 3 by default) with a soft fall-off outside the box; hollow = a signed-distance offset on a voxel grid; split and pockets = exact mesh booleans. Pro terms shows these names in the app.