I’ve made some prints fit in my printer by printing them at a diagonal. I work it out by spinning it until I don’t get an error from the slicer.
I’d rather be able to calculate exactly what will fit beforehand instead of spinning the model around in CAD or the slicer.
Has anyone found/used a calculator that can do this?
You won’t believe it but thats actually a very hard problem to solve algorithmically.
If you want to search further, it is called the “containment under free rotation” problem.
Edit:
There is a tool called
trimesh
that lets you load in meshes, compute convex hulls, and compute oriented minimum bounding boxes. https://trimesh.org/quick_start.html search for “bounding box” on that page.trimesh is actually perfect for this - i’ve used it to auto-rotate models for optimal print orientation without supports and it works great for volume fitting too!