Transcript:
In this video, we’ll take a look at how you can prepare a 3d model for printing on a 3d printer and to do this. I’m gonna use an example. I saw on Facebook by the person that was asking the question so he was building a snowman Ready to print off, So I’m gonna do the same thing. One thing you’ve got bear in mind is don’t use shade smooth because this will only show you how it looks in a 3d view. The shade flat option is how it will look when you print it. So make sure you leave on shade flat and to get it looking smoother, just use subdivision, so control 3 and then that’ll subdivide it and then just apply that. Okay, so now. I’m going to create a second sphere for the body or torso, rather, and then I’m going to create another one for the neck like so, and now I’m going to create, remove the 3d cursor so that it’s in the center of the sphere, so I’ll do shift S cursor to selected, making sure obviously that the sphere was still selected and the reason I’m doing that is because I’m going to put a Sousa in the center of the sphere, and I’m gonna move it forward slightly. Okay, so the reason. I’m trainer Suzanne is because it’s got problems with the mesh that we need to make sure a fixed ready for 3d printing. So I’m gonna run through the problems. There’s three problems in total just before that ice subdivide Suzanne a little bit. Maybe [Music] slightly maybe control 4 and we’ll apply that as well. So I’m going to join these all together, so I’ll select them all and press Ctrl J. So now it’s all one object and I’m gonna go into Wireframe mode and just put on the X-ray so Zed and then total. Okay, so you can see the first problem is that we’ve got intersecting geometry. So if we look in there, you can see inside of the spheres. We’ve still got the rest the sphere, so that’s no good. Also, another problem is if we go into the eyeball. I’m going to face mode and press L on. My mouse is hovered over the eyeball. You’ll notice at the eye. Although it’s part of the same model, it’s actually it’s just a disconnected piece, so that means it’s not printable because it’s got to be the entire mesh. There’s got to be one continuous, watertight surface, so no holes, and obviously that is a great be whole and separate piece. Additionally, a problem you might run into, is you. Might you must might look as though there aren’t any holes in it. So if I just rip this, so if you look at this mesh now that will look as though there’s no hole, but if you move this vertex, you’d see it is actually two vertices, so there is a whole way even that doesn’t appear to be one. They still a hole, so that’s another issue and basically they are the issue, so the intersections any holes and basically, it not being a one continuous, watertight mesh. Okay, so there is a way to fix this that requires literally no effort. There’s no sort of manually filling the holes in or connecting pieces up or looking for all these vertices, or, you know, you could merge the vertices. Obviously you could just go into edit mode. Choose one and then press em and by distance and that will remove any vertices, but I need to select them all first. So am I distance you can see we’ve removed those two vertices that we’re in the same location, So how this works is it will merge two vertices within this distance from each other. That’s good, so that’s one way you could fix that problem. But it’s not going to solve the other issue, so there are two issues of the intersections and the separate pieces so to fix those what we’ll do. I’ll just duplicate this first, so I’ll call that monkey original. Just delete these other objects, so got monkey original. I’m going to duplicate that so ship D and I’m gonna call the duplicate normal If I call this work on. So this is the one we’re gonna change, so I’ll hide the original. I’m going to work on and what we’ll do is add a modifier, so just make sure. I’m not in any mode. Come out of this if I believe will leave it on that boat. I’m gonna add a rematch modifier. So as soon as we had the really much modifier, it has solved some issues so inside the mesh now there are no intersecting pieces, so it’s all one mesh, even the eyeballs. If we look at the eyeballs, they’re now all one mesh well. The problem is obviously we’ve lost all that detail so to bring the detail back, we need to decrease the voxel size. And you’ve got be careful. If you go too low, you could run out of memory and blender could crash. So it’s a good idea to make sure you save your file before you do this so. I’m just I’m lowering the box of size. One click at a time until we get adequate detail body, so we get and click quite close now, putting a zero to probably get one more and that’s looking reasonable. I mean, if we can try and go a little bit lower, but I do find quite often. If we go too low, then it does weird things, so I try point Zero Zero Five. See what like that it might disappear. Yeah, try point Zero Zero Seven. No, that’s probably about as low as we can go and you can see it. Obviously it’s not very smooth there and this is no way you want. Obviously on your mesh. So there’s a couple of ways you can fix it. I’ll apply this rematch. So the first way is, you could try and use the inbuilt lets. Just come on here. So the first thing to do is try and use the inbuilt remesh, so there’s a the voxel. Remesh is basically the same as the modifier that we’ve just used or I’ve got Quadri mesh. So if I give this a try, it’s a bit of trial and error, and it’s a little bit slow, but we’ll try and increase this to maybe say 10,000 and I’ll turn off, use paint symmetry and let’s give that a try, and this is a little bit of sleight as I mentioned. There was an alternative method which I’m going to show you as well, Obviously, In fact, there’s two alternative methods. I want to show you so we’re 40% through now, and we just need to hopefully get a decent topology that follows the flow of the mesh so that we can subdivide it, and, you know, sharpen it up and things, so it’s taking them little while 50% it was quite a dense mesh, So I’m not sure how many vertex vertices it has, but you can see, it’s pretty dense, that’s. Why it’s taking so long, yeah? I don’t thinking cancel out of it. I mean, well, lets. Leave it so nicely finished and we could see. I mean, that doesn’t look anywhere. I like. Did I say 50,000 I’m sure it don’t know 10,000 so 10,000 faces. Obviously he’s nowhere near enough. Well, that that is a pretty bad result to be honest, but what we can try and do is if we now go into the modifiers, and we add a subdivision surface and maybe we give that a couple so just to get it smooth again and then what we’ll do is well. I they shrink wrap so a string like this, and then we’ll choose to shrink, wrap it onto the monkey original, and you can see, we’re getting this sort of result and the reason we’re getting this is because they’re holes on the original model. This bit around here. There’s nothing for drink wrap on today. We can try a different target normal project. Perhaps that’s probably about as good as we’re going to manage to get that, so it’s not great so well. Cancel that what we can do. Instead, it is more. Cancel back to the point where we did it. Quadra flow. Remesh, lets. Go back to here. So we’re back at the Vauxhall version. If we look at the mesh and then let’s turn off, you can see that it is pretty high res. What the aim is is to get this nice and smooth and the way to do it. Without any additional add-ons, you’re gonna lose a little bit of sharpness, but what we can do is if we’re going to sculpt mode and the reason. I’m using sculpt mode is because we could use a smooth modifier, but it’s incredibly slow because it’s not something multi-threaded whereas the tools in the sculpt mode, because if they’ve had so much work on them recently. A lot of these tools are now multi-threaded. So if you’ve got a decent CPU, then you’ll find that this will be massively faster than using the modifier. So basically, I’m using this mesh filter and you can change the mode at the top, so we’ve got a smooth scale, etc, etc, and there’s also a surface smooth, which smooths whilst trying to maintain the the volume so the shape. So let’s have a go at that. This mesh may be a little bit too complex for it or a little bit too dense. We’ll give it a try, so I’m gonna come back out of wireframe and let’s give this a try, lets. Just see what options we’ve got. Maybe ten or tears move up. Maybe ten radius up a bit as well, so we now hold the left mouse button down, click on the object and then drag you can see, it’s moved it, but we have lost a lot of detail and that was using the normal smooth mode, so let’s just undo that, and we’ll try the surface smooth and see what we get from this. So same thing. Hold the mouse down and then drag, keep drawing it, so it’s very slow to do it. I mean, it’s! The difference is happening very slowly. Nice to try the lets. Just try smoothing it by hand and see where this work. If we zoom right in, we turn that down a bit and I like to turn the strength down as well. Maybe 10 that radiates off a tad, and if we just run the mouse around like like, so then we can smooth it by hand, so that’s one option and that ensures that we’re only doing the part that’s problematic rather than all that. All right, so because we’ve got symmetry turned on, He’s actually doing it to both size, so that’s one option and this match is now completely watertight and what? I could do as well just to get rid of these bit here now. This is reasonably smooth. I’m gonna mask these parts, so we’ve actually got a new tool called raw face set, so if we click on that, then zoom out a bit, so we’re covering this entire area. If I I don’t want to fake this this part, so I’m going to just bring that around and then if I press shift now and I can smooth those edges of the mask and that will actually affect the geometry is wrong, so I can do now if I go into this mode again and then choose use face set if I do anything to this match now, so for example, if I surface smooth, then it’s not going to affect the eyeball. We’ll, nice, try it with the normal, smooth, so if it will note it. I’m exaggerate it initially as nice as I drag that across, we’re not affecting the eyes, so that strength up a little bit, so you see the eyes are not being affected, But then there was a thing. I obviously I’ve gone a bit too far undo that. I think it’s to about here, so try and smooth this somewhere about. They’re not done it too much. And then if I come back out, we’ve got this effect, so we’ve got quite nice result, so that’s one way of doing it, and that’s more of a hands on manual method of, you know, again, a nice, smooth mesh at the end the way. I’d recommend is to use if I just duplicate this. I’ll hide this one. You know, if I let’s move this one to the left. So that’s the original, quite sharp, obviously, and this is the smooth version, so I’m going to take this one and I’m going to duplicate it and I’m going to hide the original again and with this one. I’m gonna do the same as I did before, so I’m gonna use a remesh modifier. I think we had it on point. Zero zero Six thing you want point Zero Zero Seven. Okay, so we’re back at the position. We were out before just before We took that into school mode, so I apply this remesh and the one going to do. Now is there’s actually an add-on you can get and I bought it. It’s 12 V or 12 euros for three months, and then after three months it just expires. And if you don’t want it, you don’t get charged. It’s called quad remeasure from Exo Exercise, so ex0 Si de I think exercise, and I’ll put a link in the description away and what you can do is use, choose the model. Let’s just turn on detect, turn off, detect hard surfaces and remesh, so let’s leave. Let’s put this to a little try it at ten thousand same as the Quadrant, The Qadri mesh That’s built into blender, so lets. Try this and we’ll notice that this is massively faster, so just keep an eye down at the bottom. So there are, it’s not sure if you can even see this it. But it’s 50 percent erratic and it’s shooting up quite fast 75 95 succeeded and look at the difference. Look at the wireframe, and the difference is we’ve got. We’ve got the topology trying to flow the actual. Follow the flow of the geometry, not perfect there so. I think I’ll do it. I’ll undo that, we’ll give it another. Try, so let’s give it 20,000 Let’s see how this does so again. It takes a little while to start up, although I’ve got four instances of blender running and OBS video recording as well. Obviously, so I still going pretty fast run. Seventy-five percent already 95 percent. And there we are so. I think that’s a better job. We could still probably go a little bit higher, but you can see. Because we’ve raised the quad cam up a bit. We are getting a better flow now around the edge there, and the reason that is important is because if I add a subdivision modifier, so subdivision surface, and that’s going to this mode, so this is without doing any smoothing. So if I zoom in press, don’t forget, this is how it’s gonna print so it is gonna be, you know, no, not perfectly smooth, but I could increase this and one more and that’s completely smooth there. It would not have to do any manual. Smoothing, we’ve basically subdivided the model. So if we look at the wireframe for both, this is very dense now, so there’ll be a nice, smooth print and this one. He’s also dense, an obvious misprint as well, but the difference says this one’s just cleaner. You’ve not got any of this. You know, jaggednes’s that you can’t remove without over smoothing. So my recommended way would be to use this Quadri measure. I mean, hopefully, blenders, quadri mesh. Will you know improve in the coming months because I think face set in the sculpt mode should help with that well? Yeah, so that’s. What that’s the way under that model now could be exported for your printer. I think STL format, and I’ll show if any of them take other formats like Fbx or OBJ. Well, the main thing is that it’s now. One completely continuous, watertight mesh, so that’s? What wanted to show you? Hopefully that’s useful and thanks for watching.