Hello, I used Splines and extrude to make a D shape. Although it looks smooth in Solidworks, the resulting 3D print does not. I can see a series of rectangular segments making up the curved surface. This shows up when I viewed the STL file using a viewer. How to create smooth surfaces so that they not only look smooth in Solidworks but also look smooth when printed using a 3D printer? Is there a setting to create smooth curve surfaces in STL format?
Thank you. What are the recommended values for Deviation, Angle and Maximum Size? I read that increasing the resolutions would increase the file size and time to export. Does that also increase the time to complete the 3D print job?
The time required to print the object is determined by your printer slicing software. The STL output in Solidworks determines the smoothness and accuracy of the STL file needed to import into that slicing software.
It is not a one size fits all setting. Kind of depends on the curvature and ow smooth you want it. It does increate the time to print, but it does increase the time to load the file into slicer software.
The geometry exported by the stl format is made of little triangles. To make it look smooth when printed, you have to make the triangles very small. That's done in the export settings for the stl format.
STL files are triangulated surface files where it breaks surfaces into triangles. In SOLIDOWORKS you do have options to increase the number of triangles it will break the curved surfaces into.