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

Making more patterns with Meshmixer

The pattern tool can also create interesting surfaces using the model's mesh as a template. This is very similar to what we did in Chapter 5, Manipulating Meshes and Bridges, when we used TopMod to make 3D pipes of a wireframe. In this recipe, we'll discover how Meshmixer can be utilized to create an interesting texture.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll use the Meshmixer bunny again. It's a good form with lots of curves and it's not a solid, so that'll give us an opportunity to see what happens inside the model. First, we'll need to make a quick modification. We need to reduce the bunny's polygon count.

We can do this easily using the keyboard shortcuts. The shortcut Ctrl + A will select the entire model and Shift + R will bring up the Reduce window. Reduce the bunny to 96% and save the model.

How to do it...

We will proceed as follows:

  1. Load the reduced bunny mesh. Go to Edit and choose Make Pattern.
  2. Change Tiled Tubes...