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A while ago I tried printing a Vampire Lord from Heresy Lab, and when I went to remove the supports the feet came right off and there was clearly a hollow space inside the shin armour where it should have been solid. Sure enough, I check the file in the slicer and the lower leg armour is indeed a hollow shell with no interior, which even leaving aside issues of trapped resin means the legs are super flimsy at its native scale, barely a few pixels thick in Lychee.

I don't want to write off a model I paid for though, so I'd be keen to know if there's any way to easily fill in these voids and make the STL solid and printable. Autorepair in both Meshmixer and 3d Builder don't do anything for it and Meshmixer's 'make solid' function either turns the model into a rougly person-shaped blob or crashes entirely. I thought about adding some supports along the inside of the legs to fill the space as best I can, but that's proving very fiddly and I'm not convinced it'll even work.

Anyone got any ideas? If not, I guess my only option is contacting the sculptors and asking them to fix the error.

I use mesh mixer, create a simple shape that fits inside whatever you are trying to fill, and then merge it all together.


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This thread on Reddit also seems to give a few alternatives. Maybe one of these might help.

https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/kzkrqg/how_to_fill_up_hollow_stl_models/

Lychee also has a library with a few shapes or you can also attach supports and then adjust their properties. Both approaches can let you fill a void in a model yourself. Then when you slice the model all those shapes/supports that fill the gap just get turned into "print resin here" data and thus print as normal with the rest of the model.

I'm sure there are better/different ways to fill in things like Blender, but the above method certainly works to give you a rough fill-in method that's perhaps a little simpler to grasp in concept.

I have the same problem with a lot of models: voids behind armour plates, helmets, sunglasses, inside of pouches, weapons, etc.
I tried filling it with Lychee shapes and Meshmixer shapes, both didn't really work for me.

I resorted to filling the voids with supports in Lychee, that works out okay, but still takes a lot of time and is kinda messy. But yeah, I didn't find a better solution and file creators often just don't care because "it printed for me".

Yeah this is a very common problem with heresy lab. I reported some to them, yet they fix nothing and leave the models on sale. The things wil get printed with resin bubbles in them and explode on the tabletop...

Anyway, here is how I managed to fix a couple of heresy labs, using MeshLab 2016.12:

Filters > Color Creation and Processing > Ambient Occlusion

Filters > Selection > Select by Vertex Quality. Play with sliders to select low quality values, i.e. all the interior vertices that are not visible (try min 0, max 0.01).

Filters > Selection > Delete Selected Vertices

Otherwise, still worth opening in blender and fixing manually... You'll need a good rig though, HL models are very very large

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. Seems like my initial plan to just fill it with supports is still the best option, it'd be an awkward shape to fill in Meshmixer and anything more technical than that is probably beyond both my skill level and the capabilities of my computor.

This one seems nice and simple

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/meshmixer/filling-a-hollow-object/td-p/8130841

Seems worth the 5mins it should take to give it a shot.

Yes, you can place supports via your slicer program inside your model, which works fairly well, but can be a pain.

There was this great Skyrim Giant on Thingiverse that had hollow issues that made the model unprintable and so fragile, it broke every time. Someone had done a solid version, but a lot of the crisp detail was lost. So I took the detailed hollow version in 3D Builder (free Microsoft program) and placed cubes and cylinders inside the body, legs, chest, arms and head, kind of a simple skeleton. In 3D Builder this is SUPER easy. It made the model printable for either resin or filament.

I have found lots of models that just need a little support piece placed somewhere, either inside or outside and 3D Builder works like a champ every time. You can also save the file as a 3D Builder file to work on later as all separate pieces if you find you need to make adjustments or changes or save all merged together as an .stl file.