The last step before 3D printer control software. Prepping digital models. Design software is getting better at providing output for 3D printing. Inspect your models in design software. Third-party models help you inspect, analyze, modify, and repair your models. Check for red flags. Correct your digital output before you start messing with the slicer settings to reproduce it in the physical world. There are also other digital model preparations to consider. Great. So you've picked a digital object you want to produce with a 3D printer. What's next? Ready to print it? Just about. Let's add one more stage before you fire up your 3D printer control software, one that may save you a lot of pain and agony later. Whether you design something new or explored the resources in earlier lectures to download a digital model online, that part file might need additional processing before you have a ready to print mesh export file that you can import into the 3D printer control software recommended for your 3D printer. Your goal is to bring these files in without any issues or red flags. You might be lucky. The file you have on your system right now might not need any further help. These days with so many designers and engineers needing 3D printing ready output from their design packages. Many of these issues with mesh export have bee solved or improved by the design software developers themselves. As a result, even the online repositories themselves. Once a topological integrity Wild West tend to be less hit and miss than they used to be. But if you are unlucky and your scaled architectural model or medical scan part file has too many errors to be printed as intended without additional assistance, that is where the content of this lecture comes in. I feel that it is essential for the 3D printer operator to have a good working knowledge of the best practices for mesh export files and how to recognize the red flags that warn of future printing problems. My recommendation is that you pick up one of these as a means to check your mesh export files before doing additional work on them as an early warning check. We will explore mesh export best practices along with a few of the many third-party tools available to help you inspect, analyze, modify, and repair your models to get them that one validation stage over from 3D mesh export to 3D printer-friendly digital mesh export. Prepping digital models. Question. What software tools can be used for 3D printing? How can I learn how to design for desktop manufacturing? What desktop 3D printer joinery techniques grant the freedom and flexibility to fabricate your digital model but also result in a complete assembly with the mechanical properties that are required? Can I repair a digital design or mesh file to improve how it performs in the printer? What is the best way to export a digital model for fabrication? What is a feature test and why would I want to make one? How do I prepare a file for a feature test? Digital preparation strategy. What you need is 3D printer-friendly digital mesh export. The best strategy, identify what you have and what you need next. Some key areas. Printing technology, printing hardware, material, post-processing, assembly, and installation. Digital preparation strategy. Some of the best practices for exploiting meshes from 3D packages are not designed with 3D printing in mind. What you need is 3D printer-friendly digital mesh export. Best strategy. Identify what you have and what you need next. Consider a handful of later steps before you prep your model for fabrication. What role will your final part play? Will you need to make this part again and again? How many foul translations does your design need to pass through from design software to our next stage, 3D printing control software? In general, checking your mesh export as early in the process as possible can be a good thing. It doesn't have to wait until you have a final design ready to run on your printer. Sure, I am thrilled that this stage of job preparation plays a smaller and smaller role for most printing projects. But even so, my recommendation is for you to get used to checking your export meshes. Take care to inspect and prepare digital models with an eye to the fabrication requirements for your 3D printer. Make checking the mesh export files a natural stage for your printing practice that you do without thinking before moving on to printing. If you do so, you can save yourself headaches, heartaches, and a mountain of wasted plastic. While 3D control and slicer software can sometimes do a surprisingly good job at making a broken model work, you don't want to wait for the final printing time to elapse before you learn that there was a problem. You want to check for red flags regarding the origin, position, size, geometric density, topology, continuity, and minimum feature size. Correct your digital output before you start messing with the slice you're settings to reproduce it in the physical world. There's also another class of techniques you might want to call upon during this stage. Modifications that have more to do with optimizing your parts, pipeline, or preliminary testing for critical interfacing with real-world objects. Knowing precisely how you move from your design environment into the software used to stage your part for fabrication, maybe the difference between successfully printing a part and successfully completing an entire project. Preparation strategy. Review, what is needed from a mash? The tools you should use to evaluate are design software, mesh utilities, and your 3D control software. You don't want to fix these problems at the slicing level. There are third-party tools available to help you inspect, analyze, modify, and repair your models. A few products are specifically designed for 3D printing, digital fabrication. Here's the list. Third-party analysis specific software, MeshLab, Netfabb, Geomagic, Magic. Repairing parts using 3D design software. Meshmixer, Blender, Rhino 3D, ZBrush. Basic file validation with 3D printer control software. Ultimaker Cura, Simplify3D. There are third-party tools available to help you inspect, analyze, modify, and repair your models. In engineering manufacturing, 3D animation, and interactive fields, there is an entire subcategory of products and plug-ins to solve tricky issues quickly and seamlessly. But these can be pricey solutions. There are also a few products specifically designed for 3D printing digital fabrication which might be the first place to check. Third-party analysis specific software. The open-source mesh lab project, Autodesk Netfabb, 3D Systems Geomagic, Materialize Magics. Repairing parts using 3D design software. Autodesk Meshmixer, the open-source Blender project, McNeel and Associates Rhino 3D, and Pixologic ZBrush. Sometimes you can get away with skipping the prep phase entirely. If you select 3D control software that offers capabilities for simple FileOpen validation and mesh troubleshooting. Packages like Ultimaker Cura and simplified 3D have built-in tools that can tell you a lot of what you need to know without specifically running an analysis suite on your model. Other preparation strategies. While inspection and repair is definitely the aspect of model preparation that draws the most attention, there are other aspects to this stage. Optimizing parts pipeline, testing real-world physical interface and fit, creating tests watches to test for interface with real-world objects, validating export parameters before job preparation, export parts validation options in your design software, third-party analysis specific software. Repairing parts using 3D design software, reviewing models in your intended 3D printer software. A few critical things to watch for. Make sure your mesh is watertight, manifold. Makes sure you have a clear audit trail for scale operations. Consider using export formats that contain additional information about each element contained such as the 3MF format. Use software that can test your model for difficult to detect issues such as issues with normals, duplicated triangles, holes, and tears. In some cases, it can be helpful to bring in a decent but imperfect polygonal model into software capable of remeshing the object. Watch out for, with medical scans, the density of the very small. Building scale scans, more data than you can use. Models source from animation, architecture, interactive, and computer graphics environment that were not produced with an eye to keeping them model solid. Correct your digital output before you start messing with the slice of settings to reproduce it in the physical world. Aim to correct your model as early in the process as possible. In this video, we went over a number of the critical elements involved with analyzing and fixing the mesh export files from your digital models. We were only able to scratch the surface. There are experts out there who spend a majority of their time evaluating, diagnosing, and problem-solving this space. So please check the course resources for some recommendations for some of the great resources available online to help you learn about topology and file preparation. The tricky thing about this digital model prepping stage is it nine times out of 10 there will be absolutely no action necessary on your part between grabbing the STL mesh file of your part and importing it into the 3D printer control software. In the future as both design software and 3D printer control software continue to add sophisticated analysis and repair features, you might only go to this stage in an emergency. However, that 10th time you'll spend fruitless hour after hour fighting to repair or retopologize a mesh, only to throw up your hands in despair and find another way to obtain useful printable geometry. The way I see it, the key is to have a plan in place for how to check, how modify, how to repair so that if you recognize an issue you'll know what extra steps you can perform to correct your model as early in the process as possible. Think of these as quick safety check before you launch. You don't have this in your checklist because there will be a problem every time. You have this the rare scenario where your part fails and you have the opportunity to solve the problem before starting a doomed print.
