Book Image

3D printing with RepRap Cookbook

By : Salinas
Book Image

3D printing with RepRap Cookbook

By: Salinas

Overview of this book

A systematic guide consisting of over 100 recipes which focus on helping you understand the process of 3D printing using RepRap machines. The book aims at providing professionals with a series of working recipes to help make their fuzzy notions into real, saleable projects/objects using 3D printing technology. This book is for novice designers and artists who own a RepRap-based 3D printer, have fundamental knowledge of its working, and who desire to gain better mastery of the printing process. For the more experienced user, it will provide a handy visual resource, with side-by-side comparisons of the two most popular slicers, Skeinforge and Slic3r. A basic understanding of designing and modeling principles and elementary knowledge of digital modeling would be a plus.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Plane alignment with Meshmixer

In a 3D software program, we have to be able to orient ourselves in this virtual space to be able to work in it. This is typically achieved by modeling on a plane in the workspace. Meshmixer generates a grid plane and a model is then positioned somewhere on or within it. We can see this illustrated in the following image:

Plane alignment with Meshmixer

Meshmixer imports the rabbit sitting on the plane and imports the sphere with the plane bisecting it. Depending on how a model is positioned in the Cartesian space of another 3D program, the positioning, when importing into Meshmixer, can be anywhere in relation to this plane.

Meshmixer orients the y axis going up from the surface of the plane. You'll find that the other programs in this book will not have this configuration. The z axis will travel up from the plane. This isn't a problem when sculpting the model in Meshmixer, but it does make a difference when using a modification tool, which depends on the plane for orientation.

In...