Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects

By : Joe Larson
Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects

By: Joe Larson

Overview of this book

3D printing has revolutionized the way that global industries conceptualize and design products for mass consumption. Considered as the next “trillion-dollar” business, every industry is in the race to equip its personnel with techniques to prototype and simplify complex manufacturing process. This book will take you through some simple to complex and effective principles of designing 3D printed objects using Blender. There is a comprehensive coverage of projects such as a 3D print-ready octopus pencil holder, which will teach you how to add basic geometric shapes, and use techniques such as extruding and subdividing to transform these shapes into complex meshes. Furthermore, you’ll learn to use various techniques to derive measurements for an object, model these objects using Blender, organize the parts into layers, and later combine them to create the desired object with the help of a 3D printable SD card holder ring design project. The final project will help you master the techniques of designing simple to complex puzzles models for 3D printing. Through the course of the book, we'll explore various robust sculpting methods supported by Blender to create objects. You’ll move, rotate, and scale the object, and manipulate the view. You’ll edit objects with actions such as bends or curves, similar to drawing or building up a clay structure of different shapes and sizes. By the end of the book, you will have gained thorough practical hands-on experience to be able to create a real-world 3D printable object of your choice.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

How do FFF printers work?


There tends to be a lot of variation within the family of FFF 3D printers. Some have their mechanisms exposed to the environment so that they're easy to repair, while some are protected with fancy covers so that they look good. Some have one extruder, while some have two or more. Some have fancy interface screens, and some require you to use a computer to access even the most basic functions. Yet, for all their variations, there are many similarities that all FFF printers share which define their type. Being familiar with how FFF 3D printers work will help you guide yourself while designing for them.

For FFF 3D printers, a computer takes a 3D model and translates it into commands that the printer can follow. The printer then takes a roll of plastic filament on a spool and uses a feeder mechanism to feed it into the hot end, where the plastic filament is melted and squirted out at a controlled rate onto the print bed, where the print is built up. The extruder head and print bed are moved relative to each other in 3 dimensions, using some sort of movement system in order to create the 3D model:

Drawing a print layer by layer like this takes, as might be expected, a little bit of time. The larger the object, the longer a print will take. FFF 3D printing isn't a fast process. But once the process is done, a new thing will have been created.