Book Image

3D Printing with SketchUp. - Second Edition

By : Aaron Dietzen aka 'The SketchUp Guy'
Book Image

3D Printing with SketchUp. - Second Edition

By: Aaron Dietzen aka 'The SketchUp Guy'

Overview of this book

Working with the amazing 3D printing technology and getting access to the printing hardware is now easier than ever before. While there are many other resources that cover the general process of 3D printing, this book is the ultimate guide to creating models for 3D printing using SketchUp. You’ll start with a basic understanding of how SketchUp is used in the 3D printing workflow and jump into the steps to create a print-ready model using only SketchUp. This 3D printing book will guide you in using SketchUp to modify existing 3D files and cover additional tools that make SketchUp an even more powerful modeling tool. As you advance, you’ll learn how to transform 2D images into 3D printable solids, how to create multi-part prints that can be assembled without the use of fasteners or glue, and how to make sure your model, whether designed from scratch or assembled from preexisting geometry, is ready to be made real via your 3D printer. By the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence to bring your design ideas to life by generating your own 3D print-ready models with SketchUp.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Prepared to Print
6
Part 2: Modeling for 3D Printing

Summary

Hopefully, this chapter gave you a good idea of what the entire 3D modeling and printing workflow looks like and where SketchUp fits in. You should now know what sort of modeling can be produced with SketchUp and have at least an idea of how it can be used to create models from scratch, edit existing models, and can be used as a repair tool.

I believe that the best way to learn to use a tool such as SketchUp is to use it, so we will spend quite a bit of time modeling and editing models in SketchUp. Before we do that, however, let’s talk about which version of SketchUp you should use and some ways to get your SketchUp ready to create print-ready models in Chapter 2, Setting Up Your SketchUp Environment for 3D Printing.