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

Exploring TopMod


TopMod was developed by a team at the Texas A&M Visualization Laboratory in the early 2000s. It hasn't been updated since 2007. The program is prone to crashing and you'll discover odd behavior as you work through the recipes. There's also very little information available on its use.

What makes this a program worth learning? You'll find that TopMod has an easy methodology for creating basic and complex forms that can be exported for further manipulation in programs such as Meshmixer and SketchUp. The forms you can create with TopMod will take considerably less effort than what can be accomplished in other 3D modeling programs.

Getting ready

You will need to download TopMod from http://code.google.com/p/topmod/downloads/list and follow the instructions for installation.

Note

This book uses the last update of PyTopMod v2.223. It's available for both Windows and Mac operating systems. Information for using TopMod on Linux can be found at https://code.google.com/p/topmod/issues...