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

Preparing your model for 3D printing

Right now, there are at least two things preventing us from calling this pencil cup print-ready. The first issue is that our geometry is not grouped. The second issue is the extra geometry in our file. Let’s address these issues one at a time!

Making a solid group

We have already gone through what groups are and why they are important, and even how to use Entity Info to verify that they are solids, back in Chapter 4, Print-Ready Modeling and Scaling for Export. Let’s get started by putting this geometry into a new group and then verifying that it is a solid:

  1. Use Select to triple-click the pencil cup.
  2. Right-click the selected geometry.
  3. Choose Make Group from the context menu.

Now, our geometry is in a group. The next thing to do is to verify that the group is a solid.

  1. Open Entity Info.

Assuming you were able to follow every step listed as written, you should see ENTITY INFO reporting this...