Smooth Triangles
This function smoothes rough surfaces and rounds off sharp edges. It is available in the Mesh Edit menu or the context menu of the screen. When you start the function, a dialog box appears with the tabs "Smooth" and "Adv. Smooth".
In the basic "Smooth" mode, you can choose how often you want to repeat the smoothing process (iterations) and you can check a box to define, if you want to smooth all triangles of the part or only the selected triangles.
With every iteration, the following process takes place: For each corner point of the triangle mesh, the average position of the adjacent corner points is calculated. The position of the first corner point is then adjusted to this average value. That way, surfaces become smoother and corners and sharp edges of objects become rounder and are pulled inwards. The surface of the triangles is reduced by that process, as corner points are drawn more closely together. This basic mode is a little inaccurate, but works very quickly.
In the advanced mode, you can set the smoothing strength in glide ratio, which means that you are able to define the level of smoothing more precisely. Then, there are three different options: "Selected Triangles only": see above. "Prevent volume shrinking": The part will be deformed but the volume won't get any smaller. "Triangulation independent": As it's being considered that the triangles have a different size, you hardly get any deformation effect and the shapes will be retained.
It is important that your triangles have a similar size. That is why it is recommended to refine triangles before smoothing the triangle mesh. Otherwise, the result of the smoothing depends very much on the triangulation and less on the actual shape of the part.
 Surface marked for smoothing, edges with more than 10° visualized |
 Smoothed triangles, no edges with more than 10° remain |
 Smoothed Cube (five iterations) |
[edit] Tutorials
Netfabb Studio Tutorial - File Repair, Close Holes, Smooth Mesh
