The Principles Of Successful 3D Printing With Blender

1. Welcome: Have you ever been interested in using a tool like Blender to create 3D models that you can print into the real-world. 3d printing is an industry that is growing at a rapid pace to the point where we can even create our own 3D prints in our own homes. And we can use blender to design these 3D models. Hi guys. My name is Joe Bailey and I am the tutor for this course on learning about it, the principles of creating 3D objects, the printing. In this course, we're going to focus on the principles, the main rooms for creating a 3D object that is going to be obesity principle, using your 3D prints out. Unlike other areas of using lend us such as the creation of renders and animations. There are a lots more warm is that you have to follow when you are designing a free model. The reason why is because when you create a print of an object's, it needs to be principal. So it needs to have a certain set of characteristics that will allow your 3D printer to successfully render out the model as a 3D objects. This course is for anyone who wants to learn about the process of designing 3D objects for the purpose, creating 3D prints. It is not for absolute beginners to blend up. As a degree of modelling ability to be required, students will be expected to be able to create basic models. This course is designed as a means of further developing your skill sets to 3D modelling so that you can design objects for 3D printing. Therefore, a background knowledge of creating simple 3D models implant up will be required before taking this course. Throughout the duration of this class, you're going to be learning several new terms that you may not have heard of before. We're going to go through what each of these terms mean and how they relate to our 3D objects. There were many principles to learn with regards to creating successful 3D prints. And we're going to learn them one by one in this class. So let's get started. 2. Enabling the 3D Print Toolbox: When 3D printing, there are a variety of pitfalls that we can fall into. Our objects need to meet a certain set of requirements before we can even attempt to print the model. In order to see exactly what these requirements are and how we can fix them, we're going to be using an add-on known as the free 3D print toolbox. To enable an add-on in Blender. Go to the Edit menu located up here, open it up, and come down to where it says preferences. From here, you want to go to the add-ons section. You can search the term you want. I'm going to type in 3D in the search menu. And if we take a look down here, you can see we have an option for mesh 3D print toolbox. This is exactly what we're going to need and it's going to be located in our sidebar 4D 3D viewport. So we're going to left-click to enable. And you can see the tab appears he. Then we're going to disclose the blend of preferences and come over to our 3D print tab. All of these options are going to allow us to do various things with regards to our selected model, such as checking some of the core statistics. So it's sizing as well as these options below. So this is going to allow us to check for any faces that might have a lack of thickness. There might be some overhang or they might be distorted. Once all of our geometry is taken care of, we could then go down and we could export using this add-on as well. But we will go on to exporting a little bit later on. For now, we want to focus on actually making sure that any foodie models that we create are suitable for 3D printing. 3. Setting Up Your Dimensions: When creating 3D models and scenes for renders and animations, the dimensions of those objects is not so important as the sizing relative to the other objects in the scene. However, if you are using 3D modelling tools like blend up for a different purpose, for example, for 3D printing, then the actual dimensions of the object that you create become much more important. In this video, we're going to be setting, blend that up so that our objects will have the correct dimensions before we begin editing them and then sending them off so that they can be 3D printed. I want you, first of all, to make sure that you have your side panel open at all times. If your fruity viewport looks like this. So there's no side panel. You can press the Enter key on your keyboard to bring the side panel interview. This will have the transform values for the location, rotation, and scale, as well as d dimensions. The most important two here are going to be the scale and dimensions. Scale is the size of the object relative to its original sizing. At the moment we're set to one on each axis. This is because we have not manipulated the scale or sizing in any way. The dimensions represent the actual size of the object. In this case, our cube is two meters only x, two meters on the y, and two meters on the z. If we scale this by half of its value, so 0.5 and press Enter. You can see that the dimensions have been halved as well as the scale. It is important to consistently apply your scale where necessary. So at the moment it's set to 0.5. And this can have significant issues. When we begin modelling or reshaping our objects. It can affect certain tools, such as the way the pebble tool functions. So if you are in a position where your scale is not set to one on all three axes. Hold down Control and press I. And then that brings up the applied menu. From here, select the transform that you want to apply. In this case, the scale. This resets the scale values back to one on the x, y, and z axis. But the dimensions remain the same. Well, I'm going to do for now is I'm just going to hit Control and Z several times. Make sure my cube is selected. And then I should have the default values of the scale and dimensions. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to reassign. The basic units that blender is using to measure our objects. Why wouldn't you to do is come over to the Properties panel and come down to this icon here where you've got this cone and then a couple of spheres. This is our scene properties tab. Left-click to open this up. And then the second option you have will be the units. Open this up. And the first option he is the unit system. If you choose none, it will use traditional Blender units, which is basically the same as using meters with the metric system. Because we're going to be freely printing these objects. We're going to want to use an actual measurement. So we're going to be using the metric system for this class. Below that you have several other options, but the only one that we're really interested in changing is this length value. Currently, it's set to meters. If we open this up, we have several other options to choose one. So we could go centimeters, millimeters, micrometers, or even higher to kilometers. But I don't think any 3D printing machines are going to be able to 3D print a cube that is a kilometer long. Well, I'm going to do here is I'm going to set this to millimeters. If we take a look in our 3D Viewport, you can see that the find units in the side panel have changed. There are now measured in millimeters. At this point, the actual sizing of our objects has not been changed. What we can do is we can manipulate the unit scale value to do this. If I click and drag the unit scale, you can see in the 3D view port that the blender grid appears to be getting larger. But what's actually happening is our objects in our scene are getting smaller based on our unit scale. So if I set this to a value of 0.1 and press Enter, the blender grid looks much larger, but in reality, if we look at the dimensions of our selected cube, then now set to 200 millimeters each. When the unit scale was set to one, they worked who? 1000 millimeters each. So this is a very quick way of being able to reduce the size of all of the objects in your scene by changing the scenes unit scale. Below that, we have this option to separate units. Now this isn't particularly useful if you are using the millimeters option for your length. However, you may want to use the centimeters option to define your length. If we activate this, you can see that we change in the side panel from millimeters to centimeters. Well, I can now do is I can activate these separate units option here. And if I was to scale up my cube, so hit S to scale. You can see that as we scale, we are reading both the centimeters and millimeters in our side panel. Compare this to having these separate units option off. If we hit S to scale, we are instead using decimal points. So this is a matter of personal preference. If you want to display your centimeters or millimeters separately, then have this option ticked. And then you will have your centimeters and millimeters on top of that. But this class, I'm actually going to turn this option off and change my length back to millimeters. If you want. The scale of the blender good, too much the unit scale defined in our scene properties, it's easy to do so. So at the moment you can see the sizing of the individual squares is quite large. But if we go up to our overlays menu located in the top corner of the 3D viewport and open it up. We can see that we have this scale value, y. I'm going to do is click on the scale value. And I'm going to use a value of 0.1 for the grid scale. Now, the squares that we see appear much smaller, but they are putting much as they were before we manipulated the unesco itself. 4. How Volume And Area Are Calculated: In a previous video, we mentioned how important it was to get the measurements of your objects right early on. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at how our 3D print toolbox can define two of the key statistics of any 3D object, its volume and area. The volume of an object is how much space the object itself takes up in our 3D world. With our cube selected, we can select the volumes statistic to check out the volume of the key. So left-click and the result will appear at the bottom here. The result we get is 8 thousand centimeters cubed. Now if you're not sure about how the volume is calculated, this value can appear to be a little bit on the higher side, but it is exactly what it should be. The volume of a 3D object is calculated based on its free dimensions on the x, y, and z axes. Now I want you to presume that these are all in centimeters. In fact, let's just do that now just temporarily. At the moment they're set to 20 centimeters each. The way we calculate the volume is we take the length of the objects, the x-axis, and we multiply it by the depth, which is the y axis. So 20 times 20 equals 400. We then multiply at that total by the height, which in this case is the SI dimension, which is also 20. What we get is 20 times 20, which is 400, and then times that by 20, which is 8000. So we end up with 8 thousand centimeters cubed. On the other hand, we also have the areas statistic. This is slightly different and gives us a different result. So here we have 2400 centimeters squared. This does not focus on the amount of space to the object itself takes up in our Friday Good. Instead, it focuses on the amount of area taken up by the faces of our objects. So this cube, for example, has six faces and they are all the same size. That's going to make it easy for us to figure out exactly how it's calculated. If we take this top face, for example, it's going to be 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters. So it's going to have an area of 400 centimeters squared. Now we know that there are six of these and they are all the same size, so they're all going to be of the same area. In this case, we can just take the single value that we have here, 400. And then we can multiply it by the total number of faces, which is six. So six times 400 centimeters squared equals 2400 centimeters squared. That's a very simplistic example of how area is calculated. But the general principles are the same regardless of the object that you create. The question then becomes, what happens if we begin to edit the shape of our cube? Well, I'm going to do here is I'm going to go into edit mode by pressing the Tab key. Then I'm going to scale my cube on the z-axis by a value of 0.5 and press Enter. Then I'm going to scale it again on the x axis by a value of two and press Enter. So what do you think is going to happen to both the volume and the area of our cube. We've halved the value of the z-axis, but doubled the x-axis. Let's go into object mode by pressing tab and then go to the item side panel to confirm this. So the x dimension is faulty, the y is 20, the z is 10. By manipulating the scale values in edit mode, we keep the scale sets or one on each axis so we don't have to apply in this case. The result is still the same as it was before because we need to click on the option again to recalculate. If I select Area, you can see that the area value changes to 2800 centimeters squared. If I choose volume, you can see it's set to 8 thousand centimeter cubed, so the volume has stayed the same, but the area is now different. The reason why is because of the way in which we have halved on one axis but doubled on another. The amount of space that this object takes up remains the same. But as a result of the scaling, the area is a little bit different. So with the volume, it's going to be 40 times 20, which equals 800 times 10, which equals 8 thousand. So 8 thousand centimeter cube. So it's the same as before. But with regards to the area, It's a little bit trickier to calculate. So for example, let's take the two smaller faces on either side. Now, on the y-axis, they're pretty much the same. And on the x-axis there ClO, because they're flat faces. The only thing that's changed with the two sides is the height of both sides which has been halved. So for each of these sides, it's going to be 20 times 10. So it's going to be 200 on each side. Now when it comes to the top and bottom faces that we have here, we basically doubled the size on the x-axis. So in this case it's going to be 20 times 40, which is 80. Now the formula used to calculate the surface area thus change because of the slightly different shape. But the general principle remains the same. We are looking at taking the total area value of all of our selected faces to give us this result here. So again, going back to this example here, we have the two sides which are going to be 200 centimeters squared. Each. Top and bottom is actually going to be 800 centimeters squared because it's going to be 20 times 40. And then on the other two sides, we're basically having one axis but doubling the other. So the surface area of these two sides is actually going to be the same as it was before at 400, because it's going to be, in this case, faulty by 10. If you add those up together, you will end up with a surface area of 2800 centimeters squared. 5. Manifold Vs Non Manifold: In this video, we're going to be looking at two different types of 3D object, manifold and non manifold. Basically, a manifold object is one that is suitable for 3D printing. A non manifold object is not. What we're going to do is we're going to hide our cube and just bringing in a Suzanne objects. Now, even though this is just a simple object that has been added into our scene, it is in fact a non manifold object. And I'm going to show you why. What we're going to do is we're going to hit the Tab key to go into edit mode. And I'm just going to select one of these eyes. I can do that by pressing the L key. And then I'm just going to bring it out on the y-axis. The reason why this is a non manifold object is because these eyes are disconnected from the main body or the mind face. Because of this, we can actually see into the face itself. There are two properties of non manifold objects in particular. The first property is the fact that it has no wheel thickness. We can see inside of Suzanne's head. And we can also see that these faces don't actually have any thickness to them. The fact that we can see inside of Suzanne is actually the second property of a non manifold object. So because this geometry does not a closed loop, then your 3D printer is going to have difficulties when it comes to creating your model, especially around the areas where there are no faces because it's going to be expecting some, especially if there is no fitness on the inside. So what are the solutions to making a non manifold object into a manifold 1. Well, with the 3D print, talk it, you actually have the ability to clean up your geometry. If we open this up, there's the opportunity to make manifold. So we have a look at the tooltip. It cleans up problems such as holes, like our eye socket here. And it will also clean up what are known as non manifold vertices and inverted normals. Now let's look at that last bit. Inverted normals. If we go to our overlays menu and go face orientation, then our faces will become one of two colors. Every individual face has an insight direction and an outward direction. Blue represents the outward direction, red represents the inward direction. If you're designing a model for 3D printing, you won't want to see any of these red colored faces anywhere around your model. You want them to all be on the inside where you can't see them. But because we have this open section here for Suzanne, we can actually see quite clearly these red faces. These are effectively the normals of the individual faces. So as I previously mentioned, blue is the outward normal and red is the inward. Apart from the facts that we have these open eye sockets, everything appears to be correct on our 3D model. If we attend to press this make manifold button, let's see what happens with our Suzanne object. As soon as we do that, it actually modifies our objects quite significantly over and the eye socket in particular. So what is effectively done is it's added faces where they were previously holes. If we were to pan our view so that you can see the back of the eye. You can see another face has been added here. And if we were to select this, I can bring out on the y-axis. And we've almost got the same thing, but we actually have a little bit of an issue right here. So it's not perfect. And a part of that will be down to the fact that we actually had intersecting geometry with this I. So if we were to just hit Control Z a few times, then select our geometry, makes sure that this side is the only i we have selected. Pulling it out. So that's everything. Unlike manifold pretty much fixes the issue. But at this point, you probably wouldn't want to use the eyes anyway. So we would select the eyes with the L key and then press X and delete the vertices. Now we have the eye sockets, but we can no longer see inside of our model because we have this space that has been created. 6. Avoid Inner Faces: In this video, we're going to be taking a look at another factor that can affect your ability to create a successful 3D prints. And that is the existence of faces within the volume of your object. What does this mean? Well, I've got an example here of an object that is a series of several cubes. So we're going to select this object. And then I'm going to hit the Tab key to go into edit mode. So you can see that the geometry itself has been subdivided. But if I go into wireframe mode and then go to Face Select, you'll see that we actually have at either end of the central tube here, faces that exist inside of the actual object's volume or surface area. So this face here, for example, blocks off the volume between this cube and the central cheap. And this is exactly the type of face that we don't want on our model. The same occurs at the other end. So we've got a face here and also a face here. The easiest thing to do is to select both of them. Here, x and delete the faces. 7. Hollowing Your Model: In this video, we're going to be demonstrating a second method of making an object into a manifold object. What we're going to do here is we're just going to hide it. The Suzanne object. And I'm going to bring in a novel Suzanne object that I created. And this one is slightly different. It again has the eyes, the Hope bean we created using the make manifold option. But it's also been given a subdivision surface modifier. So it's a lot smoother than the original Suzanne model. And what we're going to do is we're going to hollow out this Suzanne objects. Now that may sound like a contradiction compared to the previous lecture where we mentioned about the lack of objects, thickness being a detriment to any 3D printed objects that we may want to create. However, there is a way around this. One I'm going to do is I'm going to create a hole at the bottom of the head. So I'm going to press tab, and let's select these four faces. Hit the I key to inset to about here. Let's also scale them down a bit and then hit X and delete the faces. So from here, we can see that we've got a hole in our mesh and we can now see inside of it. But what we're going to do next is we're going to add some thickness. So in the modifies tab, go to Add Modifier and select solidify. As soon as we do this, you can see we do get a bit of artifact thing, but we're going to ignore that just for the moment. More importantly, the color of the faces inside appears blue. And this is because we have been able to add some thickness to the faces themselves. Now you can reorder these if you like. So we wield at the solidify modifier above subdivision surface. The effect looks a lot cleaner. By doing this, we actually have one very important benefit. By creating a hollowed out object. We will be reducing the amount of material that is going to be required to Prince the object itself. If the entire objects was just a closed loop, then it would use a lot more material to create volume of our objects and not just the surface area when we create the 3D prints. So with most of your models, if you want to save materials and money, it is advised to use some form of hollowing where you create a hole and then create thickness with the solidify modifier, Beida, why creating a hollowed out objects will change the amount of volume it has compared to a closed object. If I just very quickly go back to the original Suzanne objects, select it and then define its volume. You can see we have a volume of just over 2 thousand centimeters cubed. Now we have our hello Susanna objects. It's basically the same size, just subdivided a bit. So the body should be very, very close. But if we were to check this, you can see it's much, much smaller, only 88 centimeters cubed. So using the 3D prints or books, you can also view the volume of hollowed out or objects compared to closed objects. 8. Using The Mesh Analysis Tool: In this video, I'm going to show you a couple more options for identifying the geometry that may need to be corrected on your 3D model. We have a pretty good understanding of how to access some of the parameters with the 3D print toolkit. But you don't necessarily need to 3D print toolkits to identify any faces or vertices that need correction. If we go into edit mode for our object and then go to the overlays menu. You can see that we have a variety of different tools that we can use just in this menu. For example, we've already looked at face orientation. We can also enable things like the wireframe to get a clearer view of the edges around our model. And below that we also have this option labeled as mesh analysis. If we left-click on mesh analysis, we can preview certain faces depending on a specific type. So these, these are basically types of distortion. Things like overhang thickness intersect distortion, sharpness, et cetera. Now, the 3D print toolkit is better for this because we see them all in one go. But if we just de-select everything, you can see that some of these faces are given a variety of different shades. So we have some the adult blue, some that are green and some that are even tilting towards red. Basically, the closer to read, the worse it is. Now for the overhang, this isn't going to be too much of an issue for most freely prints. The overhang effectively tells you parts of the model don't have any structure underneath them. So they may be farmable to breaking depending on other factors such as the thickness. We have other types as well, such as the thickness itself. And here you can actually see that most of our object is tilting towards red. So what we could do perhaps is increase the thickness value here in the solidify modifier. And that brings the color closer and closer to blue. Don't be too concerned about this dough. As with 3D printing, the minimum thickness values for many materials tends to be around the one to two millimeter mark. Anyway. We'll go into a bit more detail with that in a future video. But going back to the options we have for mesh analysis, you can determine the type here, so the thickness, and you can also determine the minimum and maximum values. And this is part of the reason why we're getting such a closed shape to read. So if we were to manipulate this value, it gets read as still as we increase the gap between the minimum and maximum. And then if we decrease this down to say, two millimeters, which is probably recommended for the thickness of most smaller Freudian models. You can see the most of the model now appears blue, which is more of what we're looking for. So you can't go in and just play about with these options such as intersecting. Nothing appears to be intersecting at the moment, which is good, as well as things like distortion. So we're getting a tiny bit of distortion here on our model, but not too much. Remember, you're looking for the yellow and red areas in particular. And also the sharpness. Again, the sharpness values here seem to be very good, with the exception of just this little area here where we created the hull. Now, over the next few lectures, we're going to be going into a bit more detail as to what some of these terms mean. And just know that you can choose to either manipulate these values using the mesh analysis tool or using the 3D print toolbox. Body reminder of the class DO, we're going to focus on the 3D print toolbox because it is a little bit more accessible for us. 9. Cleaning Up The Topology: Using the options that we have in the 3D print toolkits, we can define which areas of our objects will require editing. We can check them individually by simply clicking on the appropriate term. So for example, if we click on Solid, then it will show us the result 40 number of non manifold edges and bad continuous edges. If we choose intersections, it will give us a result for how many of the faces are intersecting each other. We can also check all. And this will display all of the different types of geometry that fall in any of these categories. So for example, non-flat faces been faces, overhang faces, et cetera. In the clean-up area, we have the option to tessellate distorted faces based on a specific angle. And then we have the option to clean up the problems that we may see up here. So with regards to the current object, if we choose Mike manifold, very few changes will be made because most of what we see here is in a very good position, at least based on the distorted value given here. If we change this to say, ten degrees and click on distorted. You can see that blender actually changes our model quite a bit. Now I'm just going to hit control and C. And let's just review what happens here. So by clicking on this button, we basically clean up any of the distortions around our model and blend it does this by triangulating those faces. If we click this distortive button again, you can see at the bottom do we have an alert saying that we have triangulated a 151 faces? If we were to then click on this check all option. You can see the number of non-flat faces and the number of fin faces has gone down to 0. We still have some non manifold edges. As you can see, we have nine and we have 86 overhang faces. We're going to just ignore the overhang one for now. Because it's pretty easy even just by looking to spot which faces might fall under this category. They are basically the ones that are hanging down on the bottom of the object. The make manifold option will try and convert any of the edges that we have on our model for non manifold edges to manifold ones. If we check again, the number of non manifold edges is reduced to eight, but the number of fin faces is increased to two. So it's not an automates heeds process going from top to bottom. It's not going to clean up your models 100%. You're still going to need to go into your model, find the areas that need correcting and try to correct them as best you can. With regards to the make manifold option, you do get an operator panel and you can define it the merge distance here. The higher this value, the more of your vertices and edges are going to be modified. Be very careful when using this as it can't destroy your model if you pushed a merge distance too high. I recommend you setting it to point c11 just to start with and see what you end up with. 10. Minimun Thickness: In this video, we're going to be talking about the importance of defining a minimum thickness for your 3D printable objects. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into object mode for the current object and then hide it from view. And I'm going to replace it with the object labeled as FIN legged table. So this is a table object with four legs. And the issue here is going to be the legs themselves. When it comes to 3D printing, you can use a wide variety of different materials to create your models. For commercial purposes. You can even have metallic or ceramic objects created using 3D principal methods. The one thing to keep in mind when choosing your material is that each material will have a minimum thickness that will be required to ensure that the object is strong enough to survive without breaking. For example, a specific material may require a minimum thickness of around two millimeters in order to have a strong enough structure any lower than that. And it may not be very strong, so it might break really easily. Or you may find it difficult to even 3D print in the first place if the thickness is too low. So with that said, if we take a look at the checks options here, we have one that is labeled as thickness. So this will check the geometry and make sure that it is above the minimum thickness preference. At the moment, this fitness value is really, really low. If I just go into solid view and left-click on thickness, we will see that we are given a number of fin faces and this is set to 0. So with this fitness value set to 0.1, all looks good. But when we create the material, it's not going to be this fin. So let's try two millimeters for example. And we'll check again. So that's why I went charcoal, but we still have Ciro faces 0 edges. And if we go to thickness been faces set to 0. If we continue to increase this. So let's increase it to 20 millimeters. Charcoal. And you can see we now have 18 thin faces. So if we were to use our two millimeter minimum thickness, the object as it is, is actually pretty suitable for 3D printing for most of our materials. If we check the dimensions of this objects. You will see that it's 274 millimeters on the x-axis, hydrogen for E2 on the wire and 74 on the zed. But if we convert those units two centimeters, you can see that it's actually going to be quite large for a 3D object. Select just scale this down to a size more reminiscent of a traditional 3D objects that we might want to print. So this looks like a pretty decent size. Six meets 66 centimeters on the x-axis, free on the wire, one on the Z. And actually that might even be too small. Let's just make it a bit bigger. So maybe up to about five centimeters. And then as we change the scale, we need to apply the scale control I apply scale. And now let's go back to our 3D prints option. Check the thickness. And now we have an issue. So we've changed the scale to something more like what we want. But now we have all of these additional thin faces. And this comes as a result of the legs being too small. When we take the overall dimensions into account. The solution, he is simply to select the appropriate geometry and scale it up. So I'm going to hit Tab to go into edit mode. And you can select the faces that you want he using your 3D print toolkit. If I go check all, you can see that we can do this with the thin faces and also the overhang faces. If we select thin faces, it allows us to select all of the faces that we require to edit in order to correct the issue. So what I'm going to do with this geometry selected is I'm going to scale it up on its own normal value. I can do this by holding down the Alt key and pressing S. So this is the shrink and fatten tall. And what it effectively does is it scales up the legs based on their normal direction. So with each individual leg, we have one face selected on one side and then we have a face selected on the other side. By hitting Alt and S, we can scale them in the opposite directions. If we just use the S key as normal and looks at the x-axis, you can see it's just moving the legs away from the table base. So Alton S to scale along the normals. We're going to scale to about here. And then let's select everything. Hit Jekyll. And this time the number of fin faces is set to 0. So we have solved the issue of parts of an object having the lack of fitness necessary to be printed. 11. Scale To Volume And Bounds: If you are in 3D printing as a business, then you may be looking to create 3D models of a specific size or volume. A handy option that we have with our 3D print toolbox is the transform option. This transform option allows us to scale to a specific value for either the volume or the bounds. So let's take a look at the 14 of our lock here. If we left-click on volume, we get a pop-up. And it asks us to type in that the volume that we want. So for example, if I type in a value of 500 and press Okay, you can see it scales up the lock based on the defined volume. If we go to the Item tab, you'll be able to see the, both the dimensions and scale of the object have increased. Now the one thing that I would like the 3D print toolbox to do, which it doesn't do is immediately apply the new scale when we decide on a new body and value. But it doesn't do that. So what we need to do after using that tool is to without walk selected, hit Control a and apply the scale. Of course that's only if we decide that this is the volume that we want to use. We could also go and scale to bounds. So we could basically take it to a maximum length. For example, if I want all of my 3D principle objects to be approximately six centimeters in length. I can type that in here and press Okay. And now the length has been shortened to centimeters, but it's scaled on all axes equally so that we can maintain the shape. If we go to the items have, again, you see that for this object, it's scaled it to a value of six centimeters on the z axis. Now let's just do the same thing with a novel object. So let's bring in the fin legged table and select it. So at the moment the dimensions here are 995. It looks like I need to just very quickly just confirm the scale for this object. And if we go to the 3D print bounds, and let's set this one to six again, okay? And then it scales it down so that it has a max length of six centimeters. Now we go back, we can see that this time it has changed the dimension on the x-axis instead of z. Now the question is, why has it changed the axis? Well, if we hit control Z a few times to get back to the original dimensions and make sure that it's selected. You can see that the x value is in fact the highest value of the free axes at nine centimeters and 3.7 millimeters. So if I just use a novel object mass, so let's choose this one here and select it. You can see that it's highest value is on the x-axis, which is set to 58 centimeters. If we go and scale to bounce, you can see the length limit is set to the x-axis. If I was to choose another object. So the hollow Suzanne and select it. Let's check its dimensions. Again, it's highest on the x-axis. So we go to our scale to bounce option. We can scale it on again, the x axis. If I was to create an objects that had the longest dimension on the y axis. So for example, a new cube, scale it on the Z. Scaler on the x, scale it up on the y, and apply the scale. And then go to item check the dimensions. Y is set to four, u one, x seven. See ICT. And if we go 3D print scaled to bounds, you can see we have the longest option, which in this case is going to be the y axis. So that ever confuses you. Just know that when we scout to bounce, it's going to use the highest dimension, the highest value that you have formed, the x, y, and z values located here. 12. Remesh The Mesh: In this video, we're going to be looking at the topic of geometry, density. How much geometry and detail do you require on your 3D model? The short answer to this is, it's generally better to have more than less because the more detail means to bear result. However, you can't go too high with the amount of geometry density that you have. Here we have an example of a high poly rock. If we take a look in the bottom corner of the Blender interface, you will see we have all of the metadata associated with this rock. So we have the collection that it is stored in, the name of the object, the number of vertices, faces, triangles, et cetera. What we want to do is we want to be able to minimize the amount of topology that we have on our object, but maintain as much of the detail as we can. This walk in particular was created using the loc generator. So if I go mesh, we have our walk generator, and this comes with one of the add-ons for adding new objects. If we take a look in the modifies tab, you can see we have a variety of modifiers that have been applied to this object. It is effectively just a primitive object that has had multiple modifies associated to it. On creation. What we're going to do is we're going to add one more modifier, the bottom of this list. So I'm going to scroll up to the top go add modifier. And we have two choices for reducing the amount of geometry. We can either go with a decimates modifier or we could go with a rematch modifier. Now if you want to maintain detail, I suggest you go with the mesh modifier. So we're going to left-click to add the we mesh modify in. And you can see we still have the general shape, but the faces are much larger and we take a look in our metadata, you can see we have reduced the vertex count down to free a 176. Now this is a bit too far for our liking. So let's just scroll down and take a look at our rematch modifier. You can see we have four options for how we want to recreate our geometry. So we have blocks, smooth, sharp, and fossil. We have here for box or the voxel size. So if I was to increase this to say free centimeters, this basically tells us what the minimum size of the faces is basically going to be. So we need to reduce the voxel size in order to increase the detail. So as an example, I'm going to use a value of 0.1 and press Enter. This gives us a lot more detail, and it looks a lot like it did before. Only now if we take a look at our vertex count, it's at 40 thousand. If I was to just hide this modifier, you can see that it was previously close to 500 thousand with the way Mesh Modifiers not involved. So we've gone from 0.5 million all the way down to 40 thousand. Now if you still think you need more detail, then you can further decrease the size. However, if we take a look at the covenant voxel size, it's set to one millimeter. Now we have to think as well about the limitations or the 3D printer that we're using. In this case, if we take the fox or size too low, then the detail might be so following that, our 3D prints out all the material that we are using may not be able to accommodate that the smallest size. So while we could go 0.05 for our voxel size and increase the detail. It ends up perhaps creating just that little bit too much detail for when we are actually going to print the model. So in this case, I'm white, want to say a value of 0.2. The two millimeters might be a reasonable enough value for the generated lock. Alternatively, we can also change the method if we wish. So we could go with the blocks method, the smooth method, and the sharp method. And you will see that these have different parameters compared to each other. So for example, if we were to go with the smooth method, we have this octree depth option. And we can increase this value to increase the amount of detail, but also increase the poly count as well. So for example, with this object, we might go to something like seven for our octree depth, and that gives us plenty of detail. But again, I recommend using the folks who option because the folks whose size is actually based on our dimension. So it's based on the units that we are using, which in this case is millimeters and centimeters. 13. Exporting From Blender: Once you've done everything that you need to do with your object, the time will come to export it form blender. Now there are different file formats that we can use for our exports. The traditional method or exporting an object is to go to the File menu and then come down to where it says exports. We then have a variety of different options. But when it comes to 3D printing, some of these options are much more vulnerable than others. For example, dots FBX is a very commonly used file for creating video game assets and sending them over to game engines. But it's seldom used for the process of 3D printing. Instead, we want to look at options such as dots STL and dots OBJ. Now if we export from here, it's going to take us to our blender file view, where we're going to have a variety of different options. However, there is another way of doing things which we are going to be using in this video. Since we've used a 3D prints or books for so much else with regards to our Freudian models, let's use it for exporting as well. So with the 3D prints or box, you will have the export option located at the bottom. If we open that up, you can see it's fairly simplistic in the options that we have. The top option is where we want to send our exported file to. We can choose whether or not we want to apply the scale, whether or not we want to bring in any textures, and also the format itself. And here we are limited to four options, but each of these are suitable for the process of 3D printing. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. But the main two to use our STL and OBJ. So let's first of all ensure that our selected object has reasonable dimensions. If we go to the Item tab, you can see that the values are set to 84.85.7. That's reasonable enough. If you're Suzanne or your object is too big, don't forget, you can always come down to the scale tool option here. Go to bounds and set the length limits of the maximum size for your dimensions. So for example, I could go 26 if I wanted to create a really large model. And then it scales up all of my dimensions by a specific value. In this case, free 0.25, to get to that total. I'm just going to revert this back to eight centimeters and click Okay. Then we need to define where we're going to export our models to. So click on the file icon. And then I'm going to go to my Desktop, create a new folder. And this is going to be my 3D prints folder. Okay, We're going to open this up and then click accepts. So now whenever we export a file, it's going to go to this location. You can choose to apply the scale just to be on the safe side. If you have the scale values, sets or one on each axis, then you won't really need to tick this box, but there's no harm in taking it anyway. The option below will allow you to copy any textures over to the file. But since we're not using any textures for our 3D objects, which is going to keep this on ticked. And then we choose the format. Stl stands for stereo lithography. And this is the industry standards formats for creating 3D prints. So we've STL, you have the most reliable formats for creating 3D principle objects. There are some limitations, but there were also some major advantages to using this type of format because it's so widely used. It's easy to fix and rebuild STL files that have issues. But on the downside, it doesn't allow you to export things like textures and materials. If you want to bring in materials and textures as well, you will want to use the dot OBJ file. Obj is less commonly used than STL, but allows you to create a texture file as well. If we use the STL format for our objects, we can click on this Export button and a message will pop up at the bottom. That's it. That's all we needed to do to export our object. Now we just need to locate the folder that we sent it to. So if we go to the file browser, go to the desktop and locate the 3D print folder. You can see we have our object as an STL file. Alternatively, if we want to export it as an OBJ as well, all we need to do is click on the OBJ format and click Export again. And if we go back to our same folder, you can see this time we have two new files added. So this is the object file, the OBJ file, which stores the geometry data. And then this one, he is our MTL file. This is the one that stores, I want materials and textures. However, you may notice that we have one small problem here. If we take a look at the two files that we have just exported, both of them have a size value of one KB. Now for the MTL file, this is actually perfectly fine because there is non-material data associated with this object. So that's expected. But what is not expected is bought the 3D objects file to also have a size of one KB, especially compared to our STL file, which is almost two megabytes. The reason why this has occurred is because when I exported it, I did not have my Suzanne object selected. When you are exporting fired a 3D prints or box, you need to make sure that you have the object that you want to export selected, the 3D view ports. So we have it now selected. I'm just going to make sure that the scale is applied. The format is OBJ and click Export. We get our message at the bottom. And if we go back to our folder, this time, we have our MTL file still with one KB. But now the OBJ file is 2.5 megabytes, and that's exactly what we want. And you'll also notice that it uses the same name. So it basically overwrites any file that has the same nine in the same folder. 14. End Of Class Challenge: Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen, on completing this class for setting up Blender to create 3D principle objects. It is now time we finish on our end of class challenge. For this challenge, you must complete the following projects. Perform an analysis of the object that is provided with the project resources and make it ready for free, the printing. Things to consider. Make it hollow to preserve material usage. Think about the material that you might use, that the type of object provided. Ensure that your dimensions are accurate. Remember, if it's too big for your 3D printer, then it's not going to be able to print it. Is there any intersecting or distorts its geometry on the model? Are the normals, correct? And what are you going to export the model as? What do you think would be the best file formats? Complete this challenge in order to complete the class. Thanks for joining me and I hope to see you next time.