Transcript:
I’m not sure if many people know this, but it doesn’t matter what software package created an STL file, be it, SolidWorks fusion, 360 free CAD Open S card or even Tinkercad they can all be modified and tweaked in blender. An STL file is an STL file. It makes no difference where it came from or what the source was ahead of viewer. Ask if I can help them. With a project, they’re working on their 3d printing designs that have a grid of square holes and she’s finding the holes are too small when printed, the files were created in open. Esqueda. Initially, we tried tweaking slicer settings like reducing the wall count and setting the in filter solid 100% but the holes were still too small. The viewer kindly sent me the openers. CAD files to look at one of the files. We’re still an open S CAD format, so I downloaded open S CAD watched a couple of tutorials and exported the file to STL upon watching the Open S CAD tutorials. I was struck by open S CAD simplicity and the way you create models purely by typing code. What a great way of working, particularly if you have a document in front of you with everything covered by measurements or parameters. I can see how this would be a real time-saver, but I digress. I imported the STL files into blender and opened up the holes. It was very quick and easy to do so. I thought I would make a video showing you how to do the same thing for this video. I’m using blender 2.8 but it’s the same process for blender 2.79 I need to mention here that blender, 2.79 and 2.80 are not different programs. I keep seeing people on Youtube talking about the All New Blender. 2.8 Oh, it’s the same program. Blender, 2.8 has some new features and they’ve completely rearranged the interface, but that’s it. If you know how to use blender 2.79 you can easily use blender. 2.8 Oh, it’s the same program. You just need to know what the new features are and where they’ve moved things too. I’m currently testing 2.80 alongside 2.79 Now let you know what my thoughts on 2.80 are soon. Okay, so with the. STL file loaded! The first thing we need to do is to select our mesh in object mode. It’s not selected. It’s just right, click to select to convert triangles to quads. We just simply switch to edit mode tab on the keyboard and you can see here. Our mesh is made up of triangles instead of quads, so we’ll make sure in face selection mode up here. We can switch to face selection mode. You can also keep an eye on where I’m doing down here with this display showing what keys? I’m pressing and with face. Selection mode selected, well press a on the keyboard, select all the faces and come here to face and select tries to quads. Now you’ll see that if I deselect everything. It’s taking taken out all the triangles, except for the triangles along the edge here. They’re not going to affect us for what we’re doing here, so that’s quite alright. So now what we need to do is to select just one of these squares, these inner squares and we can do that by right-clicking on this line here in face mode and holding down the Alt key. So Alt right, click, and I’ll switch to Wireframe view, which is Z Cross to wireframe. And you can see. We have one of those inner square selected, so these this method is going to choose all the squares that I similar to this particular selection of squares while selection of faces, so if we come here to select and select similar and select normal, you’ll see that it’s selected all those squares or all the faces that have similar normals to the ones I had selected and to deselect the wines around the outside with these ones we don’t need. I’m going to shift, Alt right, Click one of those faces where they’re joining and is selected the entire loop or deselected the entire loop. So now that we have our inner square selected what we can do is scale those inner squares make them larger or smaller, but we want to lock out the z-axi’s because if I just press S and scale now, you’ll see it’s scaling them globally rather than individually, and it’s also scaling on the XY and Z axis so to just be able to select and scale each square individually, we’ll come up here to the pivot point selector and select individual origins instead of median point so select individual origins. And now you’ll see if I just press S and scale, it’s scaling them individually, but we’re also scaling on the Z Axis. I’ll switch to my side view, and, yes, you’ll see that they’re scaling Zed as well, but we can lock out that dead axis by pressing S and shift Z, and that will just scale them on the X and Y axis and not desert axis and we can see this better if I switch to my so of view and come up to this view, so S shift said, and now I can scale the squares to make them larger or smaller if I need to, and if I just left, click and press tab to switch back to object mode, you can see we’ve now increased the size of those squares in that mesh, so it’s very simple and very easy to do now to export that it’s just simply file export STL, and if we come down here, you’ll see I’ll select selection only because that’s why it’s selected. We’re going to take scene unit and I’m going to set the scale to 1000 1000 is the disco. You need to output for cure 3.0 + slicer and and every modern slicer. I’ve come across has required me to output a scale of 1000 the case where you wouldn’t set a scale of 1000 and just set a scale of 1 is if you’re going to an older slicer or an. OEM slicer like you are 16 point. Oh, fours or 15 point? Oh, for those slices require scale of 1 but for all the modern slices you’d set that scale to 1000 Now. The other thing to keep in mind. Is that if you’re importing an STL, it may already be in scale to 1000 as this dolphin was in this case. I scaled it back down to a scale, not a workout, which is 0.01 0.001 So just keep that in mind If you’re bringing an STL file into blender. It may already have the correct scaling be a thousand times larger and you may need to scale it down by a thousand to actually work out. Okay, that’s it for this. One hope you found it useful. Have a great day, thanks for watching, and I’ll catch you. Later [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music].