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

Repairing existing models

At this point, we know that we have three holes in our mesh, and this rhino head is way too big to fit on the bed of any printer I have seen. While it is always possible that you may find more issues with imported geometry, holes in mesh and models at the wrong size are the most common issues I have seen when working with .stl files. Let’s run through the steps to address these two issues.

Fixing holes in a mesh

Thanks to Solid Inspector2, we know that there are three holes in the mesh and we know exactly where they are. Since the holes are surface borders (holes along the edges of a mesh), Solid Inspector2 cannot fix them for us automatically. Fortunately, they are pretty easy to patch.

Up until now, we have run both Solid Inspector and Solid Inspector2 in the same way – select a group, then start inspecting. This works perfectly well, and if issues that are discovered can be fixed automatically, this is great! If we run into errors...