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How to resize the models and keep the height reasonable

One question often asked is how to resize the models to a much larger size without having to have a very high relief (Z very large).

Another issue many users face is they want to keep the high relief but their tools do not allow them to reach deep enough to do a clean cut and retain all the details.

The answer really lies to how flexible is your CAD software and what you can do with it. 

Many CAD programs allow you to change the X, Y dimensions and automatically resize the Z height to match.  Of course the problem there is if you start with a model that is both high in relief and reach in details especially background information you have to treat each area differently to avoid losing too much details.

In this article we will describe how to clean a model that in the foreground is fairly high yet the background image has quite a few details we want to keep, while enlarging the model from 100mm to 500mm wide.

Of course there other ways to do the same, like slicing a model which we will discuss in a different article.

The original model has a total height of 14.75 mm and X = 102.5 Y = 78.31.  We want to make it five time larger so we increase the X to 528 mm and Y to 425mm

Using the Model Set Size menu option we can easily adjust the model dimensions 

Now the problem is the Z has shoot up to over 80mm.  We could restrain the relief by resizing the Z but this would wipe out most of the intricate background details.  We want to retain as much as possible of the details of the buffalos bodies and heads as well as keep the background details of the land and the land to a reasonable level. 

One way to do the next step is either draw vectors around the area you want to adjust the Z height or paint it using different colors as done below.  Drawing vectors is probably better and more accurate as the paint tool has a pretty small diameter and can leave 'holes' in the color painted.

With the two different areas fully colored we are ready to adjust the Z in the next step.

For the green section that has the highest Z we choose 20 mm max and check the Preserve Detail check box with 0.01 on both settings.  Of course you could try other Z to get different results.

You can now see the effect this had as the buffalos section is a lot lower than the yellow area with the background.

We now going to adjust the Z for the yellow area.  This step needs some experimentation with different numbers to get the two sections join seamlessly. I used around 8mm to get the result shown below.  Perhaps a smoothing pass or some smoothing using the sculpting tools will remove any areas that don't join 100%.

Hope you enjoyed the quick demo. If you have any suggestions or questions please contact us here