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Blender. Not great at it, but there's so many fantastic tutorials on YouTube. I can use it good enough to design and 3d print simple things. Of course, there's may aspects / layers to it. It's both broad and deep. So it's good to kind of focus on one thing at the time, and then break that down even further.
What are your favorite tutorials about Blender specifically for 3D printing? Any channel recommendations?
I do resin printing. All models get sliced into 2d layers by the slicer program. Therefore, the geometry of the mesh isn't nearly as important as it would be for something you wanted to animate or use in a game. (Pro 3d modelers take great pains to keep their meshes very clean and smooth, made up of all triangles, etc. But if you're just going to convert the thing to a bunch of 2d slices, you don't need that level of discipline.)
You can basically overlap and tweak a bunch of primitive shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc) to build a complex shape for the thing you want. Then you can export that as an STL file and load it into your slicer. Once inside the slicer you can add any needed supports and then slice it.
In order to get to this pretty basic level of competence, I just watched several tutorial videos on the basics. Like how to add shapes, scale them, modify them, mirror them for perfect symmetry, etc. I have watched some videos on texturing, lighting, etc. out of curiosity but you don't need any of that for resin printing.
And once you export it as an STL it looks like one solid thing, so it's easy to rotate it around and so on in the slicer program.
"Blender Guru" is a really well done Blender tutorial channel, but he also covers a lot of things I don't really need. Early on, I learned a lot from the "tutor4u" channel.
Wholeheartedly agree! Nomad Sculpt ^(yo-ho!) via tablet & stylus is a great addition to this notion, and makes for far better modulation in post than creating in zBrush (multiple parts v. inseparable object).
What sort of resin printing do you do, and what part of the world, if you don't mind me asking?
I have an Anycubic 4k resin printer. I'm in the US. Most of the time I am printing miniatures for tabletop gaming using STL files I find online. However, sometimes I want to customize them. And more than once I've needed to repair some broken household object and needed to print a part for it. I've also made a few original gifts for people from scratch. I'm not a very good sculptor, but I can make funny / cute things and put their name on it, stuff like that. I can also copy stuff pretty well if I have enough photos of it from enough 90-degree angles. It's a very fun hobby, I wish I had more time for it!
Oh, for sure. I feel ya there. Some days, I almost wish it was still just a hobby for me, heh. But, the hours are decent, and I absolutely love the creative aspect as well as the personalized service of most prints I make for others. I certainly had no idea that the "Satanic" pastimes I was up to in the early days would somehow build into a bonafide job, that's for sure. 🤣🤓
You actually succeeded in the quest from hobbies to career. Well done!
Thank you :)
As someone who also prints with resin, let me tell you that a decent mesh is crucial for bigger pieces that you need to make hollow. More often than not, objects are an amalgamation of smaller things cobbled together, but without vertices connecting them. When you try to hollow such a piece, it won't work "the right way", so you can end up with hollowed pieces that have no holes and will leak, break or fail somehow after fully printed.
Years ago, I also had to deal with an object that had some 50k loose vertices, invisible to the naked eye because they didn't make any edges or faces, but chitubox sliced as if it had a million faces covering the entire build plate.
Another thing I do, mostly to help with stopping chitubox from crashing, is reducing the face count of models (Modifiers -> Decimate). Yes, 4 million faces, lots of detail, etc etc, but if it's a 32-40mm tall mini, it's extremely unlikely you'll notice any differences between that original and a version with ~600k faces, both printed together.
Thank you for adding this to the discussion. I should have specified that I only print smaller things, maybe 10cm tall at the most. Most things I print are much shorter than that. I have only printed one hollowed print (out of hundreds of objects). For my modest needs, the savings on resin is usually not worth the hassle of cleaning / curing the interior cavities. I can definitely see how having bad geometry could foul up a large, complex and/or hollowed print!
I mostly print miniatures as well, but sometimes it's miniature vehicles, or other sorts of big miniatures that, if hollowed out, can drop from ~35g to ~15g of resin needed. When a typical 36mm tall mini will usually take 5g with supports, that's a big difference.
I remember I gave up printing a chibi Duran (from Trials of Mana), roughly 8cm tall, because each piece of the hair was a separate object, thus impossible to hollow "as is". The hair alone was probably more than half of the total resin needed for the piece.