Making Everything 3D-Printable

Making Everything 3D-Printable

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
UPDATE:Unfortunately this service is no longer available. One of the hardest tasks with 3D printing with SketchUp is often making something that has not been modeled properly 3D printable. This means that whatever geometry you are given needs to be turned into a "watertight" or "manifold" solid. In SketchUp there are a bunch of extensions that help with this task (namely Solid Inspector and Solid Solver). But even they can't automatically fix a model like the one shown in the 3D viewer and images below. Fortunately for us, SketchUp and iMaterialize just announced a solution that is baked into 3D Warehouse. An Example As you can see, this model is an intersection of three shapes (made without using SketchUp's Intersect tool), where I removed two faces and introduced a small triangular hole in one of the faces. I then uploaded this model to the 3D Warehouse the usual way (File > 3D Warehouse > Share Model...) and made sure the checkbox at the bottom was checked. After a...
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Turn Yourself into a Vase with SketchUp! (i.e. Making Revolved Portrait Sculptures from Silhouettes for 3D Printing)

Turn Yourself into a Vase with SketchUp! (i.e. Making Revolved Portrait Sculptures from Silhouettes for 3D Printing)

by Alex Schreyer2 Comments
You likely have seen the effect before: An image like the one above shows some shapes that look like vases. After a little while, however, you notice that the curved shapes that define the vases are actually faces - or more specific: the negative silhouette of the faces. As it turns out, this can easily be accomplished in SketchUp. Turning these shapes into real objects is also pretty simple these days as long as you have access to a 3D printer, a CNC lathe or can browse the web, where you can order 3D printed objects from any of the vendors that I list on this page. Follow these steps to turn yourself (or a loved one) into a vase: 1. Take a good silhouette picture. Then import it into SketchUp. For this first step, we will be using a technique similar to the one that I employed for the tree cutout component in Chapter 5. 2. On the exploded picture, trace the...
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