Luckily, there is an easy way to do that. So, let’s say we’ve moved our rhino pieces all around the build plate, but in fact, we’d like to go back to how the parts were arranged when they were originally modeled. And now the rhino that previously came in as one big STL file is broken up and will behave as if I imported seven different files. Doing this allows you to work with each part independently, and you can even apply different print settings to different pieces–but we’ll cover that in another video. Now you can see the rhino has split into seven different parts. We just go to Mesh, then Separate Connected Surfaces. If we want to make changes to just the rhino’s legs, we can split the model into its individual parts. This can make models more difficult to work with, but thankfully there’s a great feature in Simplif圓D to help with that. Sometimes, a file has multiple solids that are all contained in the same file, like this rhino. If it’s a completely enclosed surface, the software sees that as a solid object. You’ll notice the triangles all fit together to form a surface. If you toggle on the wireframe view from the right-hand toolbar, you can actually see each of the individual triangles that make up the model. When you import an STL file, it just contains a bunch of triangles.
Today, we’re looking at the Separate Connected Surfaces feature in Simplif圓D, which can be found in the Mesh menu.
