Transcript:
How’s it going, guys? Happy Easter hope you’re spending lots of fun times with your family and friends having great dinners and all sort of things. That’s what Easter is all about, You know, having fun with your family, and I’ve been wanting to do this video for quite a while. I’m actually left little Easter eggs in previous videos, hinting towards me doing this video in the future, and I’ve been hesitant because I’m pretty only caught a lot of flack from doing this. Honestly, the Internet’s just like that, so I’m prepared. Come at me anyway, before I do it. Let me tell you a little story a couple of years ago. I stood on a year seven 3d printing Club at a high school in Sydney’s. So in this club. I started at thinking, okay. It’s mostly going to be guys, you know, young? Boys were wanting to design guns and spaceships, and, you know, space commanders and all these sort of things that sort of, you know, guys we’re going to, but to my surprise, more than half. The club was girls and the reason being, they realized they could 3d print their own toys and buy toys. I mostly mean my little pony figurines. That’s right, guys. This is a video about how to 3d print. My Little Pony, let’s get into it. Alright, let’s get started. So firstly, fire up a browser. I recommend Chrome and go to the search or whatever and type Poney Lumen, And we want the 3d pony creator. So pony Lumen doesn’t really say anything about themselves. I’m probably living someone who’s French and likes to program things and what they’ve created is this Pony creator, which is a 3d customizable Pony game and its functionality is actually to be honest, fairly insane. You can customize almost everything, and you actually pose them as well so before my 3d printing club. I would have to send them little bits like the mane and the hair and bit separately and have to stick them together in software. But now we can just do it. All online and pretty much saves us a huge amount of hassle, so it makes it really easy for kids, which is good so here you can edit, for example, different face types and you can decide how high they are. Yeah, really, tall, already Short, tiny has it width. Yeah, head size and you can do color as well and. I’ll talk about more about color later for what we’re doing. We’re not going to use color. So don’t worry too much about that Now. You know, horns you can have like an alicorn horn. Whatever that is, you know that the? Holy One, Whistlers. You can change the mane and hair type. So you know, he’s got heaps of different options, so you ready? Change that so, curly. I really love the physics as well like, you know, really, a lot of thought has got into this, which is really cool tail, which is random ones, which is really neat. You can even add sort of accessories like, like a little cute sort of scarf or something headphones. No way that’s awesome and then to make it even more insane. You can actually pose them, so for those involved in 3d modeling for games and such and animation you’ll be. Filip familiar with posing posing? Lets you, you know, change the characters look and everything based on rigging, which is sort of the bone and joints of a 3d model. So I can click this, and I can sort of tilt ahead a little bit. You can click the ear like until the ear sort of for the back. Maybe a little bit this way or this way and you can go around, and you know, pretty much pose anything you want. You can make the the front leg. Go forwards down something like that, and you can really change almost everything, including the face so facial features. You got a face? You make the eyes angry. You know, angry bunny like that, or you can make, you know, sad eyes, you know, sad? Haha, you can even do the mouth, so you know? Draw up a closed! Happy or unhappy you good and you can. Yeah, make it. Yeah, angry. You can do any combination of these. There’s also a few presets for posing, be warned. Once you click the presets you lose all the posing. You’ve already done so for example, sitting, that’s a nice little basic preset, so I keep hitting wrong buttons. Just a sigh thing and navigating you. Click to rotate, and you right clicked into pan. So I think the idea is, you can sort of zoom out and put them on the scene, which is really nice, but what we want we to get 3d printing them pan back in there. Half bro way sit and you can even do animations, so there’s a default animation for all sorts of walking and running, you know, flying even but there’s no wings, so that’s awkward. Let’s add a weight at certain wings. I said bat wings. That’s one there you go, so you have wings. You know, like a flying animation, but you can also use this animation for your posing, so it’s pretty quick and cheating, but you can take the animation speed right down, and we’d be our export in that pose so demonstrate. I will show you one. I’ve prepared earlier so to go to to save what you’ve created. Go to load or save and you can save this format. He’s created, which is Pony save, which is just us of a Javascript. I believe, but I’m going to go to import and go to this folder and here’s one I prepared earlier, so it’s sort of like a mid-air Rainbow. Dash, sort of running pose might, um, there. We go to get one of the legs down, so I’m playing to make this with the one of the legs or both. The back legs anchored on something in there instead of a meteor action shot cool. So I’m happy with that. I will go to load save, and you want to download a 3d model as an obj, so what that’s going to do is collect everything with all opposing and everything that we want into an obj file and save it. As is it, so go to that zip and extract it into a folder like so, and you end up with all of this, so this hatch includes the textures as well, but as I mentioned, were only printing in one color, so we’re going to ignore that for now, perhaps in future, if this video is popular, I might do a full color 3d print tutorial, but it’s much harder so for now we’re just going to worry about the OBJ files, so the next program you will need is my beloved mesh mixer, fire art mesh mixer and go to the folder where the OBJ files is. This is a bit of a hack, usually mesh mix. Only lets you bring in one file at a time from the import menu. But if you select all the. Obj’s separately at window and drag them in. They’ll all open up at the same time, like so so here, we have our opponent, and it’s very important to note that each individual component is actually still separate, so has separate. Yeah, the eyes are actually separate, like, you know, that’s terrifying, but they’re separate. If you send this to a 3d printer, it won’t quite know what to do with it because these are known the shells and they’re known as intersecting shells, so they’re actually intersecting each other and the printer may freak out, depending on what one you have so before we do anything to this model, we need to combine it into one uniform mesh, so two-stage, firstly, select all the objects and select combine so combined in mesh mixer, literally, it’s like putting in a folder it doesn’t actually join them so although that looks joined, it’s not so important to note mesh mix, it will not join the meshes when you use the combined tool so these are still separate shells, but they are now in one opj, which means we can export it as one obj, so we go to export and call it something like our – combined and you save it as an STL. So when the files are created, they are saved as an obj, but STL is what you want for the printer. So now’s a good time to save it as an STL. So next we you need to go to net. Fab Doc Cloud. And this is net fab’s online cloud service to repair STL files. So you need to log in with your Microsoft account? Alright, so never get to exported combined file. Let’s mine there and open that, and this will upload it to the net fab cloud service and pretty much stitch all those shells together into one uniform mesh, so we can print it and it’s just doing its hard work. I wish there was an easier and basic way to do this. You can kind of do it in mesh mixer with the make solid tool, but it’s very buggy and you lose lots of details so until I find a better solution. This is the only way you can do it for free. So once that’s done, Select, download and the Netfabb service will add fixed to the end of your file by default, so we can import and replace this scene with our combined and fixed file, so it looks exactly the same, however. If you go to edit separate shells, there’s no multiple shells. It is one manifold mesh. Two things we need to do. Now one we need to determine what size we want to print it and two. We need to do a few things to make sure it prints. Well, so these files are designed for 3d animation, so they have some very fine features, particularly the edge of the wings and the tips of the tail. They’re quite delicate and may not print very well. Also, the hair as well. The edges might be a bit shot, so firstly, we’ll set the size so units and dimensions, so it’s coming in at 66 by 46 actually not too bad. It’s a little bit small, maybe. I tend to print these models a little bit larger, so they look quite good. So let’s go with a hundred and then so nice, exhale. Yeah, it looks pretty good done, and if we go to print again. This is a multi-stage process. I wish there was a better way than just going in to save redo. Save whatever, um, But in the print option in meshmixer under the repair tool, there is this fixed for minimum thickness option. This is a magical tool that will automatically determine on the model, which areas are too thin and may fail for printing and we’ll give them thickness. And I’m not even kidding. This function isn’t even available on like high-end paid mesh fixing software, Usually it’s a dumb process of adding thickness. If you do it uniformly to the whole model, but this function is actually intelligent. I will only add it where it’s needed, so it’s pretty labor-intensive on the computer. So let it just think and do it’s thing and we’ll come back to it once. It’s complete cool on there. There we have it, So what it’s done is thickened up the areas that would probably fail. It’s added some nice little Phillips into between the wings. The tail has a nice Philips. The eyelashes are now nice and well rounded and I’m going to break off. We have lost a tiny bit of definition around the eyes, but in my opinion, it actually looks much better because what it’s done is it’s sort of in a way, subdivided these triangles to make them smoother and look better, so that’s actually a really nice model like. I’m really impressed with how this works. Then it’s definitely much better than the faceted. Look, they have coming straight out of the pony. Lumen Credit. So we all say done and this is where it gets a bit tedious. We have to save this here and then re-import it into mesh mix up. I know it’s not ideal but for free software. You’ve got to cope with the shortcomings. I guess, so I’ll go back to MLP, and this is combine fixed, thickened, because this is like the final printing interface. And if we go back, we lose it. So yes, we’re going to lose it. Import replace, and we grab the thickened one. So here we have our thickened one. For some reason. That’s a rotated around 90 degrees. I don’t know why, so I just edits transform and just spin it around 90 degrees. There we go and just bring it up a little bit. All right, so one of the things you need to keep in mind. When designing for 3d printing is the model has to stand up and it’s very easy to think. I’ll just print this and what you’ll find is it won’t actually stand and they’ll be really annoying, so it’s just going to fall the bit’s side and look crap, so we need to add a base to this print, so we can go to mesh mix and grab a cylinder and just plop it in. I don’t want them to combine as yet. I sort of bring it in and with the cylinder, You can click this box above the access. You want to change and just shrink down and height and I’ll change its height, so it’s just touching the legs, So just a quick tip. If you’re getting the gradations, you can use your up and down arrow keys to work to make them finer, and I got that tip straight from Meshmixer because they’ve been watching my videos, so let’s do that so the back legs a little bit sunken, but it’s okay, and this legs just touching, which is cool, and that’s pretty much centered, sweet, so there is one thing in meshmixer that still annoys me and fair enough, it’s free! I seen W shows the wireframe. We want to Berlin Union This Pony model to this base. You know, so the pony there is a lot of triangles. There is a lot a lot of triangles that can be used for the Brillion union function, but for the base it doesn’t need those triangles because flat, so it’s quite efficient, But if we Union these and I’m just show, an example select both and then brilliant union, it’s going to kind of damage the foot a little bit. I mean, not hugely, but still something that I want to avoid. So I’ve shown this trick in a previous video. I’ll show it here again. So you select the mesh that you want to change and what we’re going to do is add more triangles simple as that so select, make the brush size much smaller and select all these triangles stuff like that. Yeah, blah, you don’t have to you can select all of them, but I was going to do the areas I want to change. Edit Remesh and wrap the remesh way up and smooth way down. You don’t want us to change geometry so 100 remesh and smooth, very low. That’s pretty good. I might just do it again because I’ve got a pretty powerful computer. It can cope with it, so that’s a lot of triangles now, except and so now, if I combine these two with the union see, it did a very, very much finer detail billion union and didn’t really affect the geometry of the foot, which is cool and I’ll press W to turn the wireframe off again, and that’s pretty much it. That’s our finished Rainbowdash running model, so I know it’s a lot of steps but to get to this stage. It’s really just a case of saving closing reopening saving modifying saving. Alright, so here we have like a visual history of what we just did so. I got the model from Pony loom and downloaded it and this is the original model with all the separate shells. Then we pass it through Netfabb cloud to combine these shells, but really, the geometry is still pretty faceted. Then we use the fixed minimum thickness option in the print menu in mesh mixer, which rounded over some of the shapes and made it a bit stronger for 3d printing. So you can see quite obviously by the eyelashes are much stronger in this model than they were in the original, and finally, we added a base in using the boolean union tool in mesh mixer, but also don’t forget. We added more triangles to the top surface of the disc to make sure when it added the foot with the building. Union, it didn’t really damage the geometry, and that’s it. We are now ready to print so okay, so looking through the best settings to use in your up printing software. If you’ve got an up, buy quality, you want to go find, so you want to go very slowly on a model like this? Otherwise, you’re likely to knock over details, especially when it starts building. These sort of front hooves like it’ll build support. Then if it’s moving too fast, we’ll knock that over as it starts building it, so you need to be very careful, especially the wings as well and the tails. So fine is a speed you need to go at preferences Zedd Resolution. I just went at point two because. I’ve gone up mini and I can use a hack to go lower, But it adds other issues so point two is fine and a detail. Honestly, looks amazing anyway. Phil, it’s a figurine so as hollow as possible with a honeycomb is fine. Don’t go, shell. It’s not going to print well and service. It’s just rubbish to forget that angle. You definitely need to ramp up support angle. So if you want the bottom, the other side of the models look good, you want to go up to something like 45 It’ll be a lot of support. You need to pull it all the way, but it will look very good, and it’ll take longer as well, but yeah, you really need, especially for stuff like the wings and the tail. If you want if you have overhangs, it’s more likely to fail and fall over, so you ramped the support angle up and, okay, and as a warning models like this will take a long time so plan to print them sort of overnight or during the day when no one’s home because they will print for about. You know, it’s seven or so hours, so I’m just doing a calculation on this one six hours. Yes, I was pretty much exactly right, so, yeah, six hours to print, so run it when you’ve got. Yeah, the time to just let the machine do it’s thing. But because we did the fix for minimum thickness option, you can see the radiuses and rounded areas on the fragile points will mean the print will be quite strong and far more likely to print successfully than if we just saved it directly from the Pony Creator software. So yeah, there you have it if you’re a dad, and you’ve got a young daughter, and you’re really trying to engage with her on your hobbies with a 3d printing 3d design. This is the way to go like you can really show that with 3d designer modeling, it can actually be really cool because you can make your own custom things and print them in your own house within the space of a day as a really fun project. It’s something that I would definitely do if I had kids and something that I really enjoyed showing those kids at the high school. So thanks watching guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I have been hesitant to do this video, but I really just wanted to go all in. So let me know in the comments. What you think, please, no hate, um. I’m here to here for love. Oh, and if you enjoyed this video, – please do subscribe, so I will do 3d printing videos on a lot of different content, and I’ve done one for sugar games like chivalry, medieval warfare. Skyrim, you can 3d print from pretty much any 3d content online. So if you enjoy that, please subscribe and I’ll see you again. Here soon on, mega spirits have a good. Easter guy’s bye.