Transcript:
So 3d modeling is super great to be able to literally imagine anything you can think of and then model that into existence. It’s super cool, but wouldn’t it be even more cool if you could just reach out and grab that as a physical object that you can hold and touch? That would be super cool. Yes, guys, this is gonna be a video on 3d printing. It’s gonna be kind of a beginner guide to get. You guys started with the basics of what you need to know to make your first successful 3d print, just a few of the basics of how to set up your 3d printer and then how to prepare your models for 3d printing and then finished off the video by actually printing our model here and I seen what kind of results we can get as you can tell. I’m geeking out a little bit because crazy so yes. I’m totally excited to get into this video and show you guys the basics of how to start 3d print to your own models, but before we get started. I’d like to give a quick thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video for the past few months. I’ve been trying to think of ways to maximize my productivity more trying to put together a productive schedule that I can stick to. That isn’t too hard so recently. I’ve actually been watching some really interesting courses on Skillshare for how to be more productive and scheduled throughout my day, avoiding distractions and being just a little bit more disciplined and they have some really interesting information taught by professionals that I’ve been finding really useful, so I can definitely recommend checking them out yourself. Skillshare is really plan is really affordable at just eight dollars a month and let me feel the first 500 viewers can get two months free when they use the sign-up link in the description below so 3d printers. I’m gonna be using in this video. Is the mega s from any cubic. I’d like to thank any cubic for sending this printer over for this video. It’s a nice little printer, and it was easy to set up, and I haven’t had any problems with it, so we can be using that in this video and yeah, it’s gotten me some great results, so I’m excited to show you guys it in action. Also, if you’re interested in the hardware, I’m using like the 3d printer. I will link to that in the description below where you guys can check it out. It’s a nice, affordable 3d printer that goes for around three hundred three hundred fifty dollar range, so a very cheap but very good well-built 3d printer before going over to the 3d printer and working with the calibration. A little bit of stuff. My first show, you guys how to prepare your models using the open source free software blender and getting your models ready for 3d printing. Okay, so here’s a 3d model then. I modeled in blender as you can tell. It’s the Lama from fortnight. Of course, but I want to start off by showing you guys this model. This isn’t actually the finalized model. I used I want to show you guys this as an example of some of the mistakes. I made the first time I went about going to making model for 3d printing. So what’s the one of the most important things about preparing your model that I didn’t really prepare for when I made My first model was making sure your model is what they call watertight, so everything has to be attached now. I had everything attached as a single object here, but that didn’t mean that everything was attached inside the mesh. So if I tabbed in edit mode, I had mild things like the different pieces here as individual parts and then just expected it to 3d print nicely, But when you convert this to your format for 3d printing and then run it through your slicing software. The slicing software prepares it for the 3d printer. Essentially its. Um, it doesn’t handle this very well. Most 3d printers won’t handle individual objects like this very well floating objects like that will not be printed very well and as you can see. This was my first pass and it worked, but there are some parts of the mesh that are kind of loose, not very well attached and there’s also some issues like around the eyes where you can see. I just use individual spheres for the eyes, and then they didn’t really get attached to the mesh and they’re just kind of free-floating there and very delicate. So this is one of the basic things that you want to avoid. You want to make sure everything is attached now? I could have went about and just did that with. In this model, for example, here you can see on a llama. I have a boolean. Modifier is set up, so if I want to attach the little like a bit here on his harness to the mesh, I could just do that by using this boolean modifier and having this as a separate mesh and then applying the Boolean modifier as you can see here. And then if I tabbed into edit mode, you would see that it is essentially attached using N guns and stuff, and it’s the way that it will work a lot better, but what I preferred to do and what I went about doing is instead of going through and trying to add Boolean modifiers to all. These areas will CH often end up looking kind of poor in this smoothing and also possibly give some geometry errors when it comes to 3d printing. Instead of doing all that you can also obviously merge objects together and stuff in blender, so instead of doing all that, though I just recreated the lava from scratch a little smaller this time as I wanted a quicker, smaller 3d print, so I didn’t have to go as detailed, so what I ended up doing for this model to make it Perfect for 3d printing is just extrude the different things out instead of doing things like the little harness here as a separate part as I had done in my first model, I just extruded different areas out, adding a little bit of extra detail and doing the same thing for like the eyeballs here, and this gave me a perfectly clean 3d print where nothing was not attached well. Everything came across attached very nicely by doing it. This way is the next thing you want to do for. Preparing a 3d model is add some supports to your mesh now. A lot of the slicing software will give you the option to automatically have it add supports. So what I mean by supports is if you’re trying to 3d print this and you have like this area here between the legs when the three printer because it prints from the ground up, you’re gonna have an issue right here where the 3d printer won’t be able to really lay the filament across here as it’s going to just drop to the ground and there’s nothing supporting it, so that’s what I mean by some supports and you could just do this in your slicing software, but in my experience doing the automatic thing adds way more supports than you really end up needing and will kind of mess up your model a little bit when you have to go and cut off those supports later on so what I did for this model is I just went into edit mode and made a few of my own little supports by just grabbing some pieces of the mesh here and extruding it down towards the ground, keeping it nice and small, so you can cut it off later, but by adding some extra supports like this to your mesh, you 3d printed, and then you just clip these parts off, and you’re good to go same thing with his mouth here as you can see. If it’s printing from the ground up all the way to here, this would be just kind of hanging there and be printing into space, so it won’t work. Obviously so what we have to do here is again. Just grab a face here and extrude it up and give him a little bit of a support there under his chin and by doing that, it will 3d print from the ground up. It will start printing this area printing this area and it’ll all be attached nicely. So for this model. I found that this was really all the supports. I needed you might if you want to be safe at say, two supports here or something, but the scale. I’m gonna be 3d printing. This is all the support. You really need for your 3d model and one of the last things you need to do once you’ve finished with your model. Is you want it to be all triangulated? You want to convert your mesh from basically faces to triangles now? Usually the slicing software can also do this for you. I’ve done it both ways and it seemed to work. Okay, but I have heard that. Sometimes you get better results. If you just go ahead and triangulate your mesh ahead of time, so I’m blended here with them. What, you just go ahead and do to make it. A triangular yourself is just to have an edit mode and hit ctrl. T and this will go ahead and add triangles all over your mesh to make it ready to be exported for 3d printing so now. The last thing we want to do is get the scale set right now. There’s some nice measurement tools built right into blender here, and we’re gonna be measuring it with millimeters. So you’ll want to first set your scene to be using the metric system and the length to be millimeters. So under your scene settings here, go ahead and make sure that you have it set to use the metric system and that the length is measured in millimeters all right, so with that said and done what we’re gonna do is you can use the built in measurement tools, right within blender to get the scale set right for our scene, so I want to be about a hundred millimeters high, which comes out to just about two to three inches. So I’m gonna grab my measurement tool here. I’m gonna click or right at the top of his ear and then drag all the way down to the bottom of the little base that I have him on and you can see right now. We’re just add three millimeters, so it’s a really small model, even though it seems like it’s fine and blender. Its way too small for a 3d printing software and again you could always do the scaling later in your 3d software, but because you might also be doing this, too, You say send it off to have it printed on a different source. I’m gonna show you guys how to get the skill set right within blender. So with this only being three point two millimeters. We want to be about 100 millimeters, so we can do this pretty easy with just a little bit of math here, so I’m going to take a hundred millimeters and divide it by 3.2 which is what it is right now and you can see that we end up with 31 so 31 in a quarter. It’s actually what we get exactly so what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna grab our model. I’m gonna hit s and then I’m gonna hit 31 point two five on my keyboard 0.25 there we go, and now if I zoom out, you can see, we have a huge llama, but it is actually the right size for our software if I make a new measurement now grabbing it from the top there and pulling it all the way down, you can see, we sit right at a hundred millimeters there so on now. Our model is all ready to be 3d printed at the scale. We want the last thing to do. Once you have your model scale to the size, you want is to apply that scale by going to control a and then applying rotation and scale. So your model keeps those scaling parameters, so with all that said and done, all we have to do is export our model, so we’re gonna go file down to export and we’re gonna choose the STL format, so go ahead and choose STL. You can leave all these settings as done. You might want to make sure you have applied Modifiers checked, also. Because if you didn’t apply modifier, you’ll want to, and then go export. STL, so with that exported, we are done in our 3d software and we’re ready to go over to our three slicing software, which prepares it for the 3d printer and converts it to the right format for this will be using Cura. As it’s one of the most popular 3d printing softwares out there and supports a large amount of 3d printers So it will likely work Well for you so here. I am in Keira. I’ll give a link in the description where you guys can download it and they have like. I said all kinds of great presets for almost any 3d printer available so to start. I’m just gonna go over here and click manage 3d printers, and you’re gonna go ahead and find what 3d printer you have here. So if you want to add a new 3d printer, you click. Add, and then you have all these different options for your 3d printer, depending on which one you are using like. I said at the beginning of the video, I’m using the any cubic mega and it happens to be the same layout as the any cubic. I three mega here, so that’s gonna be the one I use right there. I’m just going to add that printer here as you can see. I already have it added there and I’m going to click close. So once you have that, you basically have the presets for the size of your 3d printer. The platform that you’re pretty 3d printer supports basically so it has it all worked out in the 3d software here for you and we can go ahead and open up our 3d model, literally. Click the folder there and then. I’m just gonna open up the allama that we exported to that STL. Format here. So click open. And you can see right off the bat. We have our little 3d model and this is exactly the scale that it’s going to be in proportion to the platform on your 3d printer. So in Keira, I’m just kind of rotating around my model here using the right mouse button, and I already have the scale set to what I want as you can see down here, so because we did all the prep work essentially in blender, There’s not too much that needs to be done in Keira here. If you select your model, you can go ahead and do some of the rotating options and stuff if you wanted to. If your model wasn’t already set up, but we went ahead and did all that setup already so. I’m not gonna need to do any of that. Same thing goes for these scaling because they already scaled the model up in blender. I don’t need to touch the scale as it’s already. If those controls do that, you can see. Is that to 100 millimeters down in the corner here? So everything is actually pretty close to being ready for 3d printing the last thing. I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna go over to our settings here and you can see right here would be where you would generate these support Because I already have it set up. I don’t want it to generate the support. I’m going to turn that off and then they build plates. I like to leave that just as a skirt. This will essentially just give you a little perimeter of a 3d print around the base and then start your 3d printer, but besides that these are all more advanced settings. You really don’t have to touch if you’ve got the default profile for your 3d printer on the layer. Height is such a point two millimeters on there are some settings that can be set here to get a little faster 3d print speeds, but a sacrifice is a little bit of quality. So it’s kind of up to you. I’m gonna leave these, though, as you recommended settings just turning off the build support Because I went ahead and did that in blender so with that, said and done if I click slice now, you can see it takes a second here, and then we are left with our model. So with a 3d printer. I am you, there’s two different ways now to send your 3d model to your 3d printer to start printing. Instead of using the USB cable supplied. I’m just going to use the SD card that they give you as I feel like. This is a much easier way. The transfer files, back and forth between the printer and the computer is nice and convenient and it doesn’t require installing drivers. So I have the SD card in the computer right now and you can see all I have to do is click save to removable drive and it will save it right to that USB. Drive in the right file format to be printed. But as you can see at a hundred millimeters, This would take an estimated four hours and 18 minutes. So that’s a little bit longer than I want to print. I could reduce some of the quality settings, but I want to keep the quality relatively high for this. Do a print instead. I think I’m gonna change the scale a little bit and like. I said you can do that right inside. Cura here. So instead of being a hundred millimeters tall here. I decided that maybe I want to go down to just about 75 and speed up my print time, so do that. I’m just gonna type in well. We’ll go down to 70 actually, and you can see that it automatically scales it down there. We have to you slice, but once we slice and it goes through, you can see now we’re down to just an hour and 55 minutes way, more reasonable if you ask me, and that seems like a better scale for this 3d print, so I’m gonna go down to E 70 millimeters along the height here, and I should be ready to 3d print, so I’m gonna go ahead and click. Save to my removable drive. Just saves the format right to my USB Drive if I pull up my USB. Drive here real quick. You can see that we have our llama. I’m good right there in the right format and ready to be 3d printed, so it’s time to move to the 3d printer, so with our SD card loaded with our 3d model, it’s time to plug it into our 3d printer and get printing so with our 3d printer here. One of the first things you want to do. After the basic assembly, of course, it’s not going to go over that like I mentioned at the beginning. This is any cubic of Mega S. And I’m not going to show how I assembled it. As it’s just a few parts need to be bolted together, but usually with your 3d printer. You’re going to first have to do a calibration phase after you first set it up, and that’s what involves adjusting your base to be level to be an even distance from your dispenser here for this one. You have four different thumb screws that can be adjusted at the different corners to adjust the heights of this base, so it’s always evenly being dispensed in my worst printing on the platform. So if you don’t have the calibration setup, right, your model might not be sticking to the base, right, or it might be sticking to well and kind of smearing, so it’s important to get the right distance with this one. You just use a piece of paper and as long as is a little bit of tension between the paper and the dispenser once it’s set up in the calibration phase. You know, you’re good to go. I take you a few tries in a few experiments before you really get. The calibration setup took me a little bit of trial in there, but it was pretty quick and once. I have this set up. I was given good results but again. I’m not going to show exactly how to calibrate for this printer. As depending on what printer you might be using, it might be a little bit different. When do recommend check the manual, go through the manual and do whatever they say to calibrate the 3d printer. So what the? SD card inserted with our lot already for 3d printing on it. It’s just a matter of going into the prints up and choosing the file off your SD card that you want to print. So once you start the print, The printer will start heating up the base on this one also heats up to around 60 degrees. You have all the temperatures in info laid out on your little touch screen here as well as the time it’s probably gonna take to finish your first 3d print as you can see. I have plenty of pl8 white filament here ready to be used, so that’s not going to be an issue also at this point. I might want to mention that. There are some websites out there that already have models that are ready to be 3d printed. If you’re interested in only 3d printing and not preparing your own models for 3d printing, This video is a little bit more about taking on model getting it ready for 3d printing, where you can be able to do with them on your own 3d printer or even sending it to a 3d printing service and having it done that way. So as you can tell, it’s a little noisy, but I have a Gopro set up here to take the time lapse of pretty cramped, cuz. That’s always cool to see and happen really fast. Of course. We’ll sit back and enjoy this 3/10 [MUSIC] [Music] [Music] Okay, so here’s our little 3d printed a llama family. And as you can see, this one is the one that’s. I printed a little bit smaller. This was the original one that I did. Where there’s a few errors on it. But, um, yeah, some really cool looking results. This is probably one of the coolest things. I’ve actually done recently 3d printing. It’s it’s a lot of fun. It’s really cool to be able to take something that you modeled totally in a digital space and then actually be able to physically hold on to that thing that you just model. It’s pretty cool, and I definitely recommend you guys. If any of you guys are kind of on the edge of debating of trying 3d printing and that you take that leap and kind of give into 3d printing because it is one of the most rewarding things. I think you can do, so that’s gonna kind of do it, though. I’m not gonna show how to do some of the finishing touches. I was recommended to use XTC 3d to kind of coat, your finished 3d models, and then it’s really easy to paint over that and stuff, and it gives them a nice, smooth, glossy. Finish, but that’s something. I’m gonna be experimenting with. I haven’t done much of that myself yet, but that would be kind of the next step. If you want to take your 3d model and really make it nice and smooth and then paint it or something actually, though, with this model, a slight texture that you can’t might notice on it, isn’t that bad for the fortnight, llama because it’s supposed to be kind of furry, But, um, anyways, that would be something you would do in general finishing your models, but that’s gonna kind of finish this video. I’d like to again Thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video and yeah. Did you guys learn something from this video? Getting started with your own 3d printing tasks, definitely the like, and maybe subscribe to the channel. I will see you guys in the future. Video flat cut.