Transcript:
Have you ever wondered how to print something? That’s too big to fit inside your 3d printer, or maybe you want to print something? That’s got a lot of overhangs without support today. I’ll show you how I recently reviewed. This tiny 3d printer and the thing about it is it is tiny. It actually continues to surprise me with how oil at prints, but there are going to be limitations by its miniscule size. I had a request a while ago on how to do a video on how to cut up STL’s. So you can print them in parts and then put them back together accurately, so that’s what this video is as a proof of concept. I made this rocket, which, as you can see. Far exceeds the build volume of this 3d printer, But I also wanted to do something special, so I made this. This is a beaded yellow printed almost entirely without support and that’s by cutting it up and putting it back together to avoid overhangs. Let me show you my proof of concept. Which was this little bunny? So here is the finished product for my proof of concept, and you can see from the object browsers, actually. Three objects here, so we have a bunny shell on the bottom and it’s got a hole in it. If we switch that, we’ve got a bunny shell on the top with a matching hole, and then we have a peg that holds the two together. Let me show you how? I arrived at this. So when you first open meshmixer, this is a screen you’ll be presented with an eye. Open that bunny that comes in built. First thing we need to do is to split it into pieces and to do that. We go to edit and then plane cut now by default, this is used for getting thinks of flat, for instance, cutting the bottom off to make sure you have a nice, printable surface and you just hit accept to do this. It’ll cut off the bottom. Leave it flat! We need to do it in a different way. It’s not that intuitive. I’m gonna bring my plane cut up to where I want to cut the object and I’m gonna change it from this guard half to slice, keep both and then hit accept. It looks like nothing’s happened, but I need to go to separate shells. And that reveals that we do in fact, have two different halves. Next thing we’re going to do is go to mesh mix, and then if we change it from primitives to miscellaneous, we can see that amongst some pretty crazy things here. We have these two connectors this first one here. If we drag it out gets ready printed as is. It’s got a nice flat side to it. Print it with the flat side down on the bed to avoid overhangs, except this. The second one here counts as the female part, so we’re going to drag that out and then position it when to turn off one half of the Bunny and then use the arrows to move it into position. We can see, we have a little Ridge and we’re aiming to get that pretty much exactly halfway around there and what we’re going to do is hit this button here, and that will duplicate it, so we’ve got it twice. We’ve already hit on the top of the bunny. Let’s hide one of our two items here, and now we’re going to do a boolean subtract and order of this is quite important. We need to click what we want to keep first and then hold ctrl and click the other one second. Now we come to boolean difference and we hit accept. [MUSIC] We can see it’s cut the hole in there and then we’re gonna come and switch those around, so we’re going to show the top hide the bottom and then bring back our connector. You can see it’s in the exact same position because we cloned it. Once again, we click on the one. We want to keep odd ctrl. Click on the second one boolean difference and accept. We have our three pieces ready to print, so we have a top a base and then a connector that snaps in between. Let’s see how that comes off the printer. Fortunately, this printout came out just right first. Go and now we have the job of assembling it as you can see. The pins are pretty hard to get in once you get them started. It helps to press them on a table or something else firm to help. Push them in the second. Half is always easier because one end is supported nicely. Now there is a little bit of a gap in between the two parts, and obviously there’s going to be some swivel unless you use more than one pin to stop it from pivoting. Alright, so we know the system works. So now let’s move on to the rocket and place our little pins more accurately, so we can get everything connected perfectly so here. We have the rocket that. I’m going to work on and a nice thing to check for at the start is to go to inspector and make sure it’s got no problems here. Nothing has come up, so that’s okay. Other thing to do is to go to edit and go to separate shells just to ensure that there’s not moddable parts just resting in place and not in fact connected. We can see that. I have it sitting on the base of the grid, which is going to help us later on, and the next thing to do is to do a transform and then type in the size that we want so my target printer has a maximum build height of 110 so I’m going to make this 300 and cut it into 300 millimeter tall pieces. I’m going to type that in on the side. Let’s accept that, and then we’re gonna transform it once again just to move it up to be on the base, lets. Do the plane cuts next notice here? I’ve got s for snap and a for absolute toggled. And that means when I move this here. It’s going to help me align it Exactly where I want. I can hit the up and down arrows on the keyboard as I’m doing this, and that will decide how much it snaps by. You’ll know if I come right down the bottom E in lion, it should go to zero means I can come with confidence up to 100 millimeters and know that I am cutting it exactly. 100 millimeters up will change our setting like last time, except and then immediately separate the shells. Make sure we’ve got the top one selected and we’ll repeat the process to cut it 200 hi. [MUSIC] Then we now have the three pieces where we’re going to cut the rocket. It’s time to bring in our connecting pieces from Mish Mix tab, but I’ve got three parts of the rocket and it’s time to align these little connectors in the middle of the joins, so I’m going to start by turning off two parts of the Rockets and then I’m going to have one of the connectors clicked. I’m going to come to edit transform at the moment. It’s counting Y as up-and-down. So I’m going to keep that in mind and I’m going to type in my translate, which means move to 0 for the X and 0 for the Z that puts it in the middle at the bottom for the rest of the rocket, and then for Y I simply have to type in 100 It’s gonna move it exactly where I want right in the middle. I can hit accept. Let’s repeat for this other one. [MUSIC] perfect. Well, once again, I’m gonna make copies of each of these which adapt to in each place and then we’re going to do our boolean subtract same as before, but sometimes an object with a really flat side. When you try to do your boolean difference, you’re gonna run into a problem. And it just seems to hang forever and then gives a fatal error and the process won’t complete. It’s actually a pretty simple fix. Once You know what you’re looking for. First thing We’re going to do is press. W to turn on wireframe. We can see that we have very large triangles. So when we try to intersect the two, the program really struggles. I’m going to press S for select. We’re going to paint the area that intersects and then we’ll come to edit Remesh and put this top slider all the way to the right and hit accept. These triangles are still pretty big, so we’re gonna repeat so s4 Select at the area all around it, and then once again, edit Remesh density up. Now, when we try our process, it should be pretty straightforward, and now we’re gonna repeat it another three times to put all of the holes in the object. [MUSIC] [Music] [Music] now go to three parts with the holes for the plugs and all you need to do is click and export them one at a time after it prints once again. We have the job of assembly. These pins were even smaller than the first one, and that means that even harder to get inside as you can see. Those pins are pretty stiff, and you could always reduce the amount of perimeters to give them a little bit more flex. My son is obsessed with space at the moment, so he’s very excited about this rocket. Let’s have a look at how it turned out once again. The e3d! Nano delivers the Z banding. I had in my first prints is pretty much gone. The main problem is on top there because there’s no cooling fan when it gets really skinny bits. The quality does suffer as you can see. The rocket is three times the printer volume another success so time for a challenge. Enter the beaded. Yale, I reckon this is an awesome model, and I’ve wanted to print it for a while, But the amount of support needed to print it cleanly has always turned me off while preparing this video. I figured I could get around that by cutting it up into three sections by doing this middle section as a separate piece. I could avoid all of the overhangs as long as I could. Stick it back together neatly. All right, here’s what I’m hoping is a masterpiece. It’s a low poly beaded Yale of Thingiverse and normally this things a bit of a nightmare to print because of all the support material needed. But you know what I can get it really big. I can avoid using very much support material at all and to do that. I’ve cut it into three sections, so let’s hide some bits. We’ve got my top bit and I’ve put in four plugs there that’s gonna print as is with that support. You’ve then got a mid piece or plugs matching and then four plugs down here. I’m going to print it this way. The only one bit I can see that’s gonna need support material and it’s that bit there, and then finally we have a base. It should be very straightforward, but a nice flat bottom four plugs that match and we’re ready to send this one to the printer. Fingers crossed. No ahead plan to print this really big. How big we’re talking half a meter tall from this awesome x-ray, the pl8 marble filament. I measured how much filament I had left on the roll, and then I went into simplified 3d and I use multiple processes to increase and reduce the amount of infield to support it where it needed and save on plastic and time. Unfortunately, a few hours in the filament stripped. And I didn’t have enough, so I had to shrink everything down to half the size. Fortunately was a little bit of post-processing. The reprint came out Quite nice now because everything was shrunk down. You guessed that those pins are smaller and even harder to get into place as you can see. I need quite a bit of pressure to get them into place, but eventually they did come. It was particularly hard to close the top half because I didn’t want to break it by crushing it In the wrong place, It did eventually go together, but as you can see, there are gaps, especially on the back. One one bit lifted off and left an enormous hole. I broke out my 3d printing pen with the same filament and guess what it did a tremendous job. This thing continues to perform after a bit of smoothing with a dremel tool and some files. You can barely see the joint and I couldn’t be happier with this. What a cool print! What a great model! Thanks so much, the original offer. And once again this x-ray, the marble filament does a really good job of hiding These really thick layer lines that I printed this with youll. Be seeing this one on my set in future videos. So I hope you agree. This model in this filament is really really stunning, even with the thick layer lines from using my fat. Nosal on my Tivo Tornado. Now, of course, you could simplify this technique and simply do the plane cuts and then glue the flat surfaces together, but I wanted to push it and have a little bit more precision and how everything aligned. Let me know in the comments. Have you tried this technique before you’re going to try it now? Do you think it’s worthwhile? Is there something really big? You’ve wanted to print on your printer that could never fit inside the print bed. Well, we’ve come to the end of this video. Hopefully you’ve learnt something new. I certainly learned a lot while I was make it. Thank you so much for watching and until next time, Happy, 3d printing. Gday, It’s Michael again. If you like the video, then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click. Subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification. If you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content, become a patron, visit my patreon page. See you next time.