Create Models for 3D printing with Shapeways in Blender
3D printing continues to get better and cheaper every day. It also is becoming more accessible to casual users and artists. One of the great services offering 3D Printing to you and I is Shapeways. Shapeways allows you to not only get your models printed, it allows you to create an online shop to sell your own models. It’s like the Etsy of 3D printing.
Get 15% off your 3D Print at Shapeways with code: b6cgk
However, preparing your models for 3D printing has it’s own set of requirements. You need to take into account the physical size of the model. Is the model solid or hollow? How thick are the walls? Will the form support its self in the chose material? Among other things, these are just a few of the bits you need to keep in mind when preparing your model for printing.
This tutorial takes you through the process of preparing Suzanne, Blender’s monkey mascot, for printing from start to finish. You’ll learn how to work with real-world measurements, how to hollow out the model, how to check for non-manifold meshes, how to make an escape hole, and more.
The fine print: This promotion is single-use and non-transferable, nor may it be combined with other promotion codes in one order. $5 minimum required and up to a maximum discount of $5000.00. Promotion codes cannot be applied to Shapeways Gift Cards or past orders. If you order a model that is rejected and has not been successfully printed before, we cannot apply discounts to future orders of these repaired models. If you return your purchase, you will be refunded the amount paid. Please note that shop owner markups will not be affected by this promotion. Valid through February 19, 2013 at 23:00 GMT.
I was looking at how they price materials and want to know if there is any way of Blender telling us how much materials would be used. It looks like its priced by squared cm. is there any way for Blender to calculate this automatically, so we would have a rough estimate on how much the model would cost to make?
That sounds like an idea for a new blender addon!
-bert
By default, each Blender unit is one meter, so it should be possible for Blender to calculate the price based on the volume of the model and a pricing table from Shapeways. Unfortunately, I haven’t learned Python yet so I can’t write the add-on.
Actually, there is already an addon for this by Mikhail Rachinskiy. You can find the addon linked here under his tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLXFvCH6HI
Also, you might wanna export your model to netfabb, which has pretty good error checking and repairing option (even in the free version) and it also calculates the volume of the model as well.
Where is a free version? Do you mean the 30 day trial?
You guys must be mind readers because i was just getting back into blender and wondering how i would set things up to be ready for 3d printing. Great tutorial Thank you
Nice tutorial, Jonathan. I had some problems printing in shapeways before dues wall thickness and stuff.
By the way, I may be wrong, but from experiences, if your model is larger than 10 cm, the price goes way up. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe you’re correct on the larger size price. Most 3D printers can only print limited sizes, so printing larger models requires a special printer I think.
Hey guys, I work for Shapeways so maybe I can shed some light here. The printing price is determined only by the amount of material that you use. As the volume goes up with the cube of the size of your model, yes, prices go up fast once objects become larger: twice as big = 2x2x2 = 8 times the material, three times as big, 27 times the amount of material etc.
Depending on the material, our printers can already handle some pretty big objects
Cool….need to try this
Cool this is really nice I’ll maybe try this some day
I think the sandstone is OK but I’m be inclined to use different sorts polymer clay and molds for replication because it’s still cheaper. Maybe to make a one-off to make a mold from.
If they even came up with a multicolor printing process for hard flexible plastic and charged reasonable printing prices, say like Zazzle, they’d be swamped.
As a niche tricket and jewelry shop for non-smiths they are OK.
What materials does Zazzle print in? I found a google hit that said “Zazzle 3d print Maya” but all it looked like was a poster.
The link in question:
http://www.zazzle.com/maya_3d_poster-228423961034424413
Instead of punching holes with Booleans wouldn’t it have been easier to just delete a few faces like you did with the cube?
Assuming I didn’t want to mess up the topology or change the position of the hole then this would have been easier. But using the booleans give me more flexibility in the long run. Also, since it’s for 3D printing it’s not necessary to keep the model quad or only or super clean, so long as the surface is good.
Cute Model!!!
How much did the Suzanne cost to print, just out of interest?
Is there a big difference when using the solidify mod to bring the thickness into the model instead of expanding the size of the object?
lol nm to early in the morn. Need coffee!
Question, If you wouldn’t cut that whole for the pouder, then the cube would be printed off as a solid object and I’ll need to pay more for the meterial used or there will be an error so I’ll need to solidify the walls and cut the whole? I’m asking about it, because I was planning to create a jewellery on my finger, but as you probably may guess it was to small to Solidify it. I was planning to print it off in Steel and they require to have min of 3mm wall thickness. Cheers
Neither – if we cannot remove the closed in powder, it will remain inside (as powder), but the price will be calculated as if the object was a solid. There won’t be an error.
That confuses me, so can you print solid objects?
Of course we print solid objects
They’re made out of powder, which is sintered layer by layer with a laser. You end up with solid objects, but any hollow parts where the unused powder cannot escape will remain filled with powder.
Here’s a video of the process of our ‘White, Strong & Flexible’ material that explains it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBNGnfoGGfQ
While I didn’t plan on trying to print anything anytime soon the credit made my think why not try it in the next 3 or 4 months.
So I tried to apply the B6CGK code to the ‘My Credits’ dialogue in order to save it for later and it says “Credit B6CGK is not valid.”
Hi Andy,
When you order, you can put the code in as a Promo Code during the Checkout process. I just tried and the code came up fine.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Jonathan is right – this is not ‘credit’, but a ‘discount’ that is only valid until February 19th.
OK, I thought it might be something like that. I still intend to try it sometime this year. I’ll have to do without the discount.
Hey Jonathan! I have a quick question for shapeways. If you create a object in blender for 3D printing and you upload just the STI file in shape ways and if someone wants to buy it do I have to print out the actual 3D object and ship it to them or they will just buy the STI file and print it them self ? Thanks!
You don’t have to do anything, Shapeways takes care of all printing, shipping, and order fulfillments
Since there is a Shapeways guy on here how does Shapeways reimburse? I tried Zazzle once and to my surprise sold something; but the $8 in profit I can’t send to my bank account. I can’t imagine the markup Zazzle got if I got more than $8 on one item. I’d say in the $25 range.
At Zazzle, you have to have something like $50 of profit before they’ll disburse and at their markups and new product churn it’s not likely there will be $50 in my Zazzle account even though I plan to buy a couple of frosted and thermal mugs someday.
So say I do decide to print something at Shapeways. And say I decide to sell the same item. Will I in effect get a discount price compared to someone else that buys it; eg. had I bought the item that I sold in Zazzle rather than someone else would my price be $8 cheaper than the other buyer?
Some, it’s in the faq I’m sure but CG Cookie is a natural audience for Shapeways.
@Andy: you set your own markup for objects that you sell. So if something costs $20 to print, you could sell it for, say, $35. Every time we well the object, we’d add $15 to your account. Payment is once per month, with a minimum of $30. If you don’t meet that minimum, we’ll pay you any outstanding markup in december of that year, so you’ll never loose it.
And of course you could buy the original model without the markup
Thanks for the coupon code, I was planning on putting in an order soon anyway so this worked out great!
Haha, enjoy!
I just use the Blender units and when uploading you have a choice of units.
I select mm and it uses the blender units as mm. Much simpler than scaling only according to the dimensions panel, you can see the scale in mm by using the grid. Just thought I’d share this with you, it helped me.
If you wanted to have a free floating object inside, such as a little moving ball inside a ring, how would you do that?
Look up some ‘ball in a cage’ wood carving pattterns.
3D printing should be able to handle that fine, if not then you can have a thin wire holding it in place in the model which you can then break off when it arrives
-Alex
It depends on the material – ‘White Strong & Flexible’ (Nylon) is laser-sintered powder, which supports printing moving objects. Here’s a good example:
http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/822-theo-jansens-3d-printed-strandbeests.html
‘Frosted Ultra Detail’ supports moving parts as well, but other materials don’t.
Jonathan you could mention about one useful thing which is validation programs. I found tutorial that was explaining how it works and how much time you may save while using it. In my case it is netfabb studio (free. You can import your 3d model into it and check if there will be any errors, if the program will detect some minor one, you can repair it. Very good and easy to use program. Basically it is doing “almost” the same job as shapeways autodetect systems.
Link for the tutorial (min. 45.00 – end): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e16c8uaCwzY
Sample Screenshot: http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/1589/beztytuujdo.png
Great suggestion Mieszko, I keep hearing good things about NetFabb! I just wish it was cross platform.
Thanks for the tutorial Jonathan! BTW, how did you enable transparency in the UI?
The transparency is a new feature in Blender 2.66, which comes out in about a week or two. You can download a test build from http://builder.blender.org/download
In User Preferences > System enable “Region Overlap” and then you can adjust the transparency in Themes > 3D View > Them Space Settings > Region Background
Thanks for the tip. I think the increased visibility is a huge bonus!
Great tutorial, Jonathan! I’ve been curious about 3D printing and Shapeways for a while now, so it’s great to see how you’re supposed to set up the mesh beforehand.
I have to say, though…that mess of faces around the drain holes at the end was quickly driving me nuts
Man, I’m such a topology geek…
Hah you and me both. But in this case those were merely surface shading artifacts and won’t have any affect on the print quality
Been wanting to print something years why started into learning Blender …Wish I was rich! Still Learning
Thanks Jonathan for the info
I got into Blender thanks to Shapeways, Thanks for the AWESOME Tutorial!
No problem, I’m glad you like it!
Using metric units in blender I exported a 1 meter(ear ro ear) Susane to .stl;.obj and .fbx and then imported those models into a few different CAD-tools.
The result was the same for each format. 1m in Blender translates to 1 mm.
I suppose I could send a description to Shapeways saying ‘I want this model to be approximately AxBxC mm’ but it would be nice to know how to set up the export to produce accurate results right away.
1 workaround seems to be exporting with a scale of 1000.
Yes exactly, this is a great tutorial, I did the cube at 4cm just as described but when exporting to Shapeways they said it was to small, Im going to try your suggestion and see if that works.
Is the tutorial inaccurate in this respect, or is it just a bug in certain versions of Blender causing it to export with the wrong dimensional units?
Great tutorial Johnathan! Thanks to you, I was able to make this ready to print: http://shpws.me/nlQt
Thank you Shapeways for your hard work in providing this service to us. Keep up the great work!
Thanks nice tut!
Yay! Thank you for this tute! It was one I was really looking forward to seeing. ^_^
You’re welcome! Best of luck in any and all printing endeavors
hi all , i have a little problem , i make my models just like i want , textured and all , exported to x3d and make a zip with all the texture .
Shapeways says that my texture are not in the zip file but they are .
this is my models http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=795810jigsawpuppet.jpg tell me what you think by the ways( i know the hand are ugly i working on it)
Hey Alain,
can you mail the file to [email protected]? It could be that the paths to the texture maps are not correct.
Thanks!
Bart
hi bart , i gonna do it now