How to create a single solid non-interlocking mesh

[wernight]

I know this is a question more about Blender but it's really a pretty unique usage of Blender (at least non-standard). Basically the imported mesh is like a long spaghetti (or even a straw). However it'd be very useful to build a single solid (manifold) mesh of it with no inter-penetrating faces. I think the boolean modifier does this for 2 meshes but I haven't seen a simple way for a single mesh.

Reasons to do this:

• More accurate Finite Element Analysis (FEA) analysis of forces and stress points (I think by tweaking the "spaghetti" height that we could simulate bad layer adhesion a lot better)
• Render the preview of a translucid model (example of what I managed to render )

Note that I did find a kind of a solution but it's not ideal by far: Heinz-Loepmeier/Blender-Gcode-Import#2

If someone has a way to achieve this better than my brute force voxel/metaball method, I'd be happy to learn and this could go into the README or Wiki.