Now that the initial design of the appliance is nearly complete, the final appearance and design can be refined. To do this click “Go to Sculpt” on the left hand menu to enter the sculpting mode. Once in sculpt mode the appliance will turn gray. Most of the other functions in the menu will be disabled in sculpt mode with the exception of Remesh/Smooth and Correct to Minimum thickness.
Note:
At this point most of the other workflows call for “Blockout Large Concavities”. This is not recommended for the Farrar because it will create a lot of wax on the lingual side. Instead some of the existing wax can be scraped down to create a thinner stop that leaves more room for the tongue.
Clicking the sculpting Icon on the left hand menu will allow you to change between a variety of sculpting tools.
The major sculpting tools will be: Scrape, Smooth, Fill Deepen, and occasionally Clay Strips.
Scrape is the equivalent of taking a light scalpel to the appliance and removes a thin layer.
Smooth is similar to applying a little heat to wax and will average the high and low points into a smoothed surface.
Fill Deepen will fill in the deep areas or gaps of a surface without changing the high points, like applying cold wax to an appliance.
Clay Strips will add an even layer of wax to build up thickness on an appliance.
These tools can be used to sculpt the appliance however you desire the final look to be. However for the Farrar appliance you will definitely want to scrape down the wax of the stop on the lingual side. (Shown in the two pictures below).
This is also the stage in which you can use the Minimum thickness shell that was generated after the initial shell. The minimum thickness shell is a 1mm (by default, but can be changed by regenerating the shell) version of the splint shell that is seen as a transparent red. The option in the original menu “Correct to minimum thickness” will add back that exact shell to prevent any thin areas on your shell.
Remesh Smooth can be used before, after or during sculpting to smooth out the overall appliance. This also adds more geometry to the shell so using this option more than two or three times can slow down your computer and result in the final stl taking longer to import to your 3D printing software.
