Printer limitations require meshes to meet certain criteria. These criteriadepend on the printer and material, but Blender has tools to help troubleshootand spot issues before sending to the printer.
- Blender Github 2.8
- Blender Github Facebook
- Github Blender Sculpt Tools
- Vroid To Blender Github
- Blender Github Mirror
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline-modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking and video editing. Where Blender communities live and thrive. Blender market is the final asset up my sleeve when I have to convince coworkers and future clients to include Blender in their framework. It’s obvious that such engine needs an asset store, sure, I’m still forever grateful that you guys invested the time and money to make it reality.
3D Print Toolbox¶
Blender has many available Add-ons or plugins. By default, not all arepre-loaded. One of these is the 3D Print Toolbox, which we have to enable.
Exercise: enabling the 3D Print Toolbox.
- File ‣ User Preferences (or
Ctrl-Alt-U) to open theUser Preferences menu. - In the Add-ons tab, start typing 3d print into the searchbar. Once the “Mesh: 3D Print Toolbox” shows up, click the checkbox on the farright to enable this add-on.
File ‣ User Preferences ‣ “Add-ons” Tab. Check the boxon the far right to enable
- Save User Preferences if you want this to be loaded next time you run Blender.
- Close the User Preferences window.
- In the Tool Shelf, there should be a new 3D Printing tab.
Running the 3D Print Toolbox¶
This tool checks for the following issues. Images are from the Blender 2.6docsfor the toolbox.
Intersecting faces. Internal vertices will need to be deleted
Thickness. A redesign is needed.
Overhang. Supports can be added (by extruding small parts of the glass’bowl downwards to Z=0)
Exercise: running some checks in the 3D Print Toolbox
- Set the parameters to match the tolerances of the intended printer
- Enter Edit mode
- Click the Check All button
- The Output box will show the results. If problematic regionswere found, a clickable button will appear in the output. Clicking this willhighlight the faces.
Note the “Overhang face” is a button that can be clicked. Doing sohighlights the faces (in face select mode)
Note
There should always be at least some faces flagged as “Overhangingface” since these will be on the build surface of the printer. You willhave to evaluate whether any additional overhanging faces warrantfixing.
Mesh Analysis¶
Complementary to the 3D Print Toolbox is the Mesh Analysis panel. Rather thanyes/no answers per face, this generates a heatmap of problematic areas. These images are from the Blender Mesh Analysis docs.
The Mesh Analysis panel, in the Properties Shelf. Must be in Edit Mode to see this
Overhang, with red indicating more problematic areas
Distortion, where triangulation may have a hard time figuring out how todivide faces.
Like thickness, too-sharp areas can be difficult to print.
Incomplete guide for fixing issues¶
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| Intersections | Fix geometry by deleting inner vertices |
| Non-manifold | Fill holes (F; may need Ctrl-T as well) |
| Overhanging | Add supports, or move widest face of model to Z=0 |
| Thin | Add geometry or modify original design |
| Sharp, too-small faces | Add geometry or modify design; try tri -> quad ->tri (Ctrl-T, Ctrl-J, Ctrl-T orRemesh modifier |
Blender Github 2.8
Some useful links with more info on fixing issues:
- Fixing non-manifold models in Blender, from Shapeways
- Creating hollow objects in Blender, from Shapeways
- Tips for modeling in Blender for 3D printing, from Sculpteo
Reanimate is:
- An animation library: Animations are written as code.
- Written in Haskell: High-level, purely functional, expressive.
- Based on SVG: Powerful and introspective.
- Cross-platform: Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Reanimate aims to be a batteries-included way of creating animations and illustrations. It builds on two core ideas: (1) graphics (both still and animated) should be expressed as code, and (2) reactive programming is the best paradigm for animating data that changes over time. Reactive programming has been popularized by D3.js and React.js, and familiarity with either of those two libraries makes reanimate easier to understand.
Installation instructions are available on github. If you run into any trouble, by far the quickest way to get help is to ask in our discord server.
Try it live!
Play with reanimate right here in your browser before installing it locally:
Showcase
The best way to understand what reanimate does is to see it in action. Click on the videos below to view them in high-definition. Click again to close the high-definition video.
Reanimate is built on vector graphics, including support for introspection. This example animation shows the letter 'S', and the tangent and normal of each point along the curve.
The combination of vector graphics and Haskell's expressiveness makes reanimate particularly well suited for rendering mathematical illustrations. In this example, a fourier series is used to increasingly approximate the shape of pi.
With the full power of Haskell, manipulating GeoJSON data becomes easy. This example shows country borders being distorted by a range of map projections.
Starfield. This example was inspired by a pixel-based shader. Many pixel-based effects can be easily vectorized without having to resort to pixmaps.
While SVG has built-in support for text, it's heavily dependent on available system fonts and does not support typesetting. Fortunately, LaTeX can produce SVGs and integrates directly with reanimate.
Animating with Haskell means you have access to a large number of code libraries. In the spirit of being a batteries-included framework, reanimate ships with a built-in 2D physics library, called Chipmunk2D. The video to the left demonstrates how SVG shapes can be used nearly effortlessly in a physics simulation.
All the videos above have demonstrated 2D vector graphics. But reanimate is capable of much more with the help of external programs. In this video, the ray-tracer Povray is used to apply 3D transformations to the LaTeX animation.
Blender Github Facebook
Mixing 2D and 3D graphics with pixel-perfect precision can be difficult when using a regular, perspective camera. A perspective camera changes sizes and angles, making it complicated to predict where a 3D object will appear on the screen. But switch out the perspective camera with an orthographic camera and it becomes trivial to align 2D and 3D objects. This example renders a sphere with an orthographic camera. Notice how the symbols stay the same size even as they move into the background.
Github Blender Sculpt Tools
With povray, we can project our vector graphics into a 3D world and get beautiful, pixel-based images. If we want to apply further vector transformations then we have to convert the pixel-based images back into vector graphics and this is exactly what 'potrace' does.
Blender is an amazingly powerful tool for 3D graphics and it is entirely scriptable with Python. Reanimate offers built-in support for moving vector graphics into Blender, running custom scripts, and then merging the results back into an animation. The spinning cube to the left is the famous Default Cube and represents the simplest scene possible.
Animated vector graphics are projected on to a 9-by-16 plane. This plane is then morphed into a sphere and rotated. The blender script to achieve this may appear fairly complex but was created using the blender GUI which has a gentler learning curve.
Vroid To Blender Github
Vector graphics (be they in 2D or 3D) can easily look cold and hard with straight lines and mathematically defined curves being dominant. For a more organic feel, SVG filter effects can be used to merge shapes and colors.
Blender Github Mirror
Psychedelic Octopus Cat.
Filter effects are powerful and versatile enough that the limiting factor is imagination.