I made sure that the medallion, the rings, and the bookend would all sit flat against the build platform.īlender comes with an addon for 3d printing, but it is fairly new and painful to use. Again, when you design stuff, keep in mind the limitations of the tool. I added a thin pancake of a cylinder around the lion to make it a sort of medallion and then hung it from the rest with circular rings. This time I actually needed to scale it down even more than that because it was so huge originally. stl file into this blender environment you'd need to type 0.1 in the x,y, and z scale boxes. I just thought the lion would look cool, okay? Normally when you import an. Maybe it was the "classical" feel, maybe it was a literature / Narnia reference. What I did is run over to thingiverse and grab a plaster fresco thing of a lion somebody had uploaded. You know what's so interesting about the new world of 3d printing? Physical things are now little more than ideas, floating out in the ehterwebs. Ideally I also wanted something with interesting detail to counterbalance the smooth simplicity and provide a focal point. I needed something more organic looking to counterbalance the cold, mathematical curves. I liked how it looked, but it still seemed to be missing something. Better to start with a good design than to lean on that crutch!) (** Most 3d software can generate temporary "support structure" to hold up overhangs, but it can be annoying to remove, leaves a scar on your model, and is very wasteful. From there I'll take care to not have anything floating and it should print nicely. For this reason, I'm actually not planning on printing the bookend as I modelled it, but I'll rotate it so that the book-side is laying flat on the build platform. In other words, no steep overhangs and you probably want a good, flat surface to start with**. You need something beneath everything you print. What's that mean? Well, you can't just print out into open space. The biggest one is that it builds up plastic on top of the layer beneath it. You have to think about how the machine works and what are its limitations. Even after all that, I want to emphasize that designing for 3d printing is a little more than just letting your imagination run amok. I also rounded the clips on the base to match better. Where was I? Oh yeah, so, remembering that the force is coming from the book side, I kept the same wedge idea only cut it down into a pair of mirrored arcs. Really the only redeeming part of that show was Quark, who was awesome! Dax was fine too, I suppose, for a gal who's really an "old man", who's really a big cockroach. ( Example pic.) Okay, so it wasn't my favorite series of the franchise. I thought about how I always liked the bronzy intersecting-curves motif in Star Trek Deep Space Nine. While thinking about possibilities my mind wandered in to the realm of concept art (like for movies and tv). Since the proof of concept was worked out, I could now bust out my artistical skills (or lack thereof). Also I keep all my camera, lights, etc for rendering on the far right layer (number 0) so that it's out of my face while modelling. You can organize things in your project the way you like, but here's how I do it: I use the top row of layers for the final parts and the layer directly below it for the sub-components of that part. If you use Blender mainly for 3d printing, you can save all this stuff as the default scene so that it all starts up ready to go. (I'll show you how to do that later.) Since I may want to share this file, I switch the bottom window frame to text editor (using the icon in its top-left), and create a friendly note about what's going on so the next person doesn't get confused. You just need to remember to scale the part up 1000% before printing. Now you can type in units such as 1cm and it'll do the right thing AND when you render out an image it'll be the right size. First, go to the scene tab on the right and switch to metric with a scale of 0.01. Blech! I'll show you how to get around that. That's not only annoying not having real-world units, but even worse, even a relatively small part will be too big for Blender to render a picture of. That is, Blender exports in "blender units" rather than metric or imperial units. Anyway, Blender has an interesting quirk when it comes to exporting. If you don't, you may want to pause here and go get familiar with all that. In other words I'm making the assumption that you know how to navigate around, add objects and modifiers, switch layers, tweak points in edit mode, etc. Not to mention there are already many of these on the internet. I'm not going to go into an in-depth description of how to use Blender, since that's a tutorial in and of itsself.
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