Bringing Your Designs to Life with 3D Printing in Blender
Throughout this Blender tutorial we'll explore some amazing tools and workflows that will prove essential to you as you start out on your 3D printing quest. Software required: Blender 2.71, Tinkercad.com, Meshlab 1.3.3, netfabb Basic 5.1.1, Shapeways.com.
What you'll learn
Throughout this Blender tutorial we'll explore some amazing tools and workflows that will prove essential to you as you start out on your 3D printing quest. We'll go through the basic printing methods and materials, and we'll also go over free 3D-modeling apps including Tinkercad and Blender. We'll cover methods of working with polygon geometry to prepare our models as well as cool techniques to lower the printing cost. We'll then upload the optimized models to Shapeways, the world's leading 3D-printing marketplace and community, for final checks before sending them to the printers. Though the videos will mostly focus on using Blender, the concepts apply to any 3D application of your choice. By the end of this Blender training, you'll have learned the fundamental workflows of preparing and optimizing your 3D models for any type of 3D printer. Software required: Blender 2.71, Tinkercad.com, Meshlab 1.3.3, netfabb Basic 5.1.1, Shapeways.com.
Table of contents
- Introduction to 3D Printing 5m
- Shapeways Crash Course 5m
- Understanding 3D Printable Materials 6m
- Shapeways Guidelines and Limitations 5m
- Free 3D Printing Applications 4m
- Quick Modeling with Tinkercad 10m
- Modeling, Grouping, and Exporting from Tinkercad 7m
- Setting up a Blender Scene for 3D Printing 6m
- Applying Object Transformations in Blender 9m
- Hollowing Simple Objects and Creating Escape Holes 11m
- Creating Wirefame Structures from Solid Models 11m
- Simple Real-world Measurements in Blender 9m
- The Importance of Manifold Geometry 10m
- Repairing Non-manifold Objects 12m
- The 3D Printing Toolbox 9m
- Interactive Mesh Analysis and Repair 10m
- Advanced Hollowing Techniques for Organic Objects 16m
- Exporting for 3D Printing 13m
- Converting and Simplifying Models in Meshlab 7m
- Repairing and Slicing Models in netfabb 13m
- Publishing Designs to Shapeways 14m
- Setting up a Shop on Shapeways 9m
About the author
Apollo Spiliotis is an architect in New York. He specializes in building information modeling and 3D visualization by day and is a CG artist/3D printing enthusiast by night. Having been published in industry websites and magazines, his fascination with 3D design led him to found archiCADmonkey.com, where he shares news, tutorials, tips & tricks, and interviews of luminaries from the design world. He has also taught 3D design at the University of Manchester (UK), where he studied Architecture, an... more