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Blender 2.67 Feature: 3D Printing Toolbox

36

Blender_print_tools

3D printing from Blender is going to get SOOOOO much easier with the new '3D Printing Toolbox' in 2.67. It'll include all kinds of calculations and visualisations including my favorite: wall thickness.

Ton Roosendaal writes:

It was about time to put a bit of focus on 3D printing tools in Blender once!

Dolf Veenvliet now is working for Blender Foundation on a new training DVD, to introduce 3D modeling to 3D printing enthusiasts, and to present the workflow for making proper geometry for printing. He works with Campbell Barton on a new toolset for 3D printing, which includes options for interactively checking manifoldness, wall thickness, weight, etc.

Got wall thickness?

Got wall thickness?

Dolf owns a Makerbot, and Campbell has a Lulzbot, so things will be tested well for home printing too. More advanced models will be submitted to Shapeways; like a full color Sintel statuette and the Tears of Steel "Quad bot".

The 3D toolbox script is currently being tested and reviewed by Sebastian Koenig for a local 3d printing company as well.

It can be found in any recent Build of Blender as add-on, named "3D Print Toolbox".

More news about the DVD and documentation for the toolbox will all be available around the next release, 2nd half of April.

Links

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

36 Comments

    • Hi,

      Graphicall.org uses blenderstorm.org for login... and that website is currently being moved to a new server... People should be able to long in and upload again soon!

      • I'm not Brian, but I'm a high school student that's going into engineering, and I like using Shapeways for 3d printing. Until now I had to use workarounds for measurements, now I can keep it all in Blender. It really is getting as good as the "pro" programs.

  1. Isn't it time for a new term to describe an object made by a 3D printing process? Or is there one already? Calling it a '3D print' seems a bit clunky to me.

  2. Hi everyone!

    I'm really excited to be working on a new Tutorial DVD with the Blender Foundation. I am currently recording and testing these lovely new features.

    Please do take the opportunity to suggest any content for the DVD that you would like to see included!

  3. Thanks so much for making this. I was asking shapeways about a tool for blender I am so happy they were receptive to the idea! Blender, Opensource and 3D printing making scarcity an obsolete concept! Rock on!

  4. I have at home a prusa i3 whith dual extruder, and a ordbot hadron that I will finish to assemble hopefully this week, at work (art school) a prusa i2 and a wallace, and done two workshop in other art schools where we assemble one wallace per school.

    I use blender a lot for 3D printing, and welcome this feature with a biiig smile.

  5. I have a suggestion, this maybe a nice feature, could be even COOL?

    As vertices are easily projected under say a overhang?
    They could be used to support overhangs in a print with in Blender as part of the process for 3d printing.

    These strut/Points to be snap off that hold the structural overhang?

    There is a way of thickening vertices using the skin modifier addon in Blender. So it could be a more procedural or color coding OBJECT feature?

    This SKIN MODIFIER is a new addon in Blender
    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.64/Skin_Modifier

    Iv started using Blender for 3d printing and CNC. I used a package called MeshCam. Compared to CNC, 3d printing takes allot less planning.

    This could make blender very popular for 3d printing as it solves overhangs and Blender already has most of these features solved?

  6. This is great, thanks!

    Since it's still in development (or is it? The post is a couple of months old), is it appropriate to post feature requests and bugs to the Blender tracker?

    Namely, it would be nice if it could take the scene scale in consideration when checking wall thickness.

  7. I can also highly recommend using the 3YOURMIND plugin (https://www.3yourmind.com/3d-print-add-on-blender) as an additional workflow step after using the 3D Printing Toolbox.

    With a single click from Blender, you can take the file with all the settings you have created and put in in the 3YOURMIND online platform to be analyzed. You can select a material so that you are confirming specifically if the paramaters you have set in your model work for that format, it will do basic formatting file corrections as part of the optimization and then you can select to have it printed at no extra cost by a variety of 3D Printing Service providers. Or download the .stl file and print it yourself!

    Because you are able to see a visual representation of any error points in the 3YOURMIND platform, it also becomes even easier to make the specific fixes with the 3D printing toolbox.

  8. I would still like to get a copy of Yorik's and GreyBeards original python volume and quantities scripts since they could provide a good basis blender quantity, bounding box, and volumes takeoff info for fabrication management. All of the links I have run down are broken.

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