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

Setting Up Your SketchUp Environment for 3D Printing

Nowadays, when it comes to selecting a program to use to create a 3D model for printing, we are spoilt for choice. There is both free and paid software that allows you to create 3D geometry in different ways using different modeling tools. Since you are reading this book, we will spend some time in this chapter exploring the advantages of using SketchUp to create 3D models for printing.

Personally, I think that SketchUp is an amazing choice of 3D modeling tool, and I say that having used a dozen different modeling software packages over the years. To get SketchUp to make exactly what you need when it comes to 3D modeling, you will need to spend a little bit of time upfront learning about how SketchUp does what it does and then getting it set up to start modeling. Fortunately, this is exactly what this chapter will help you to do!

In this chapter, we will cover these main topics:

  • Understanding SketchUp’s capabilities...