Answer to nTop Essentials Challenge Problem

In this lesson, we will walk through the answer to the optional test problem for our nTop Essentials course. So, in the problem, we were asked to Shell a part, 3 mm thickness for the wall, add a hole for powder removal, and then export as a 3mf file.

First, I have that part imported into nTop. You can either search in the search bar for that, drag it right in, or go into our Utilities Tab and Import Part. So, we have this here. Then we convert that part to an implicit body. When we’re doing any type of modeling operations or Boolean operations, we’ll need that to be an implicit. Then, in the modeling tab or in your search bar, you can search for our Shell feature. So, we put in that implicit bracket, that thickness is 3 mm, and we have that direction inwards. If I type I to isolate that and then type X to do a section cut, we can see I have the shelled part.

This part does not yet have a hole, so our next section is dedicated to that hole creation for powder removal. You could follow a similar step as shown in the follow-along lesson on creating those holes. But to show a different technique, if you wanted an extra challenge, I am making a hole that looks like this bottom face here. So, the first thing I do is make a variable that is that face and I’ll change that color so you can really see that. Then what I’ll do is Scale the object. So, I don’t want to have the entire face gone, I want it to just be a smaller shape that resembles that. So, I’ll Scale that object about 0.5 and the scale point will be the centroid of that face.

To get that scale point, you can go into Block Details under Properties, under Bounding Box, and then choose that centroid. And then if we look at that scaled object, we can see that it’s scaled. Next, I’ll convert this to an implicit body. So, let’s view that, and it looks a little bit different, and it looks a bit more like a rectangle. The reason for this is when we have a surface that we are converting to an implicit for something so thin, sometimes that visualization looks a little different than you might expect. But when we do the Thicken Body, it would do exactly what we expect. It has that right shape that we’re looking for, and this is a thickness of 12 mm. You could have chosen a different thickness. So, if I look at my shelled part again and I still have that section cut visible, we can see that this is going to go through that entire bottom surface. So, you could change how much you wanted for this thickened body to create this hole. The larger that thickness, the larger that hole will be, and you just want to make sure that it’ll go through that entire surface. So, I chose 12 mm. You may have something a bit different. You might not have used this CAD technique at all.

Last thing we’ll do is a Boolean Subtract. So, I’ll take that primary body, which is the shell part, and just subtract out that face to remove, which is our thickened body. And so now we have something like this. And let me go a little bit farther. We can see what this looks like. I also have a Blend Radius of 2 mm, so we can see that we have that rounding on that edge now.

Once I have this final part, the last step is to export this if I wanted to print it, for instance. So, our last section, which is export, we’ll use our Mesh from Implicit Body. You can search for that. You could also go into our Utility section. We have all of our conversions in here as well, where the body will be that final part. Tolerance I used as 1 mm, and I chose to keep this sharpened, and we get something like this. So, for a smaller tolerance, it would take a longer time to compute, but it would be a bit more precise. This is just an example, so I’m just going to have that 1 mm tolerance. You could have had something a little bit different. And then I’m using our Export Mesh, and for the path, all you have to do to make sure it’s a 3mf is just choose that you are just exporting it as a 3mf file. And that’s the answer to our optional test problem.