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I am new to Blender but have been 3D printing for a while. I am trying to make my own model from an image to print a toy key for a piggy bank. I imported a SVG to get the shape of the key and converted the resulting curve to a mesh for depth. I now have holes from the bitmap tracing of the image that I am trying to fill. My plan for actually completing the project is to fix up the image and generate a new SVG, but I would like to know how to fix holes like this in the future. object view edit view

Marshal White
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  • "My plan for actually completing the project is to fix up the image and generate a new SVG" No matter how good the image is a traced result will always be a random mess. And even if you had a hand made clean curve, the conversion would still result in a messy mesh. Either leave it as curve object or model it by hand with proper topology – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Aug 01 '18 at 21:06
  • @DuarteFarrajotaRamos Is there a way to add depth (Z axis) to a curve object? I have been converting it to a mesh and using the solidify modifier for this. – Marshal White Aug 01 '18 at 22:26
  • Curves have lots of builtin geometry generation tools no one seems to be using for some reason. See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/82188/fill-along-the-front-of-a-path-of-an-svg/ and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/47825/extruding-vector-files-in-blender/ and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/47217/extrude-and-bevel-an-imported-svg-curve/ and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58564/curve-bevel-function-scale/ – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Aug 01 '18 at 22:41

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You will have to fix the topology of this. This is quite a mess.

A good clean mesh based of quads is easier to fill. To close holes you can select the edges around the hole and press F

enter image description here

I have created this very basic key, by extruding faces from a plane using E with edges selected in top view. You can use the SVG as reference if you want it to match the lines of the model. I then selected all faces in face select mode by double tabbing A and extruded the model up along the Z axis by pressing E.

Then I selected the edges around the model and bevelled them using CTRL+B

sorenfroststaal
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    I will have to practice my modelling much more to be able to achieve models like this in less than 2 hours! But it seems like there is no easy way and if I want to have more customization in the future I'll have to make a model with quads and match it to the flat image to maintain shape.

    Side question: Did you learn modeling on your own or did you have some courses or learning about it? I'd like to improve my skills but I am just doing this as a hobby and only oriented towards 3d printing the objects. Thanks for the quick and detailed answer!

     – Marshal White Aug 01 '18 at 22:35
  • I have taken online courses, and supplied with youtube and good ol' fashioned trial and error. A good, free and fast way to learn basic modelling would be the anvil series by Andrew Price: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi87Dap_WOc&t=26s – sorenfroststaal Aug 02 '18 at 06:34