3D Printing for beginners - 2020 - How to MAKE MODELS to 3D Print for FREE

The TechNiverous channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to check us out on Patreon, pop over to www.patreon.com slash techniverous. That's T-E-C-H-N-I-V-O-R-O-U-S. Here, we do our best to stay up to date on the latest and greatest in 3D printing and tech, and keep you informed on the latest developments in these sectors. So, if you're interested in getting updates on 3D printing, or technology such as programming, robotics, artificial intelligence, and things of that nature, make sure you hit that subscribe button down below, leave a like on this video, and comment about what you'd like to see in the future, because we make these videos for you. Welcome back, folks. I am TechNiverous. This is 3D printing for beginners, 2020 edition, and you may have seen the first two installments of this series and thought to yourself, well, that's all well and good, but what if I'd like to make my own model? So, today, we're going to cover a couple of options for doing that. So, if you take a look at my desktop here, I have it distinctly organized into a few sections. In the bottom left here, you can see a bunch of Slic3r software, other than Kira, which is pretty much standard, attached to my start bar down here. There are plenty of other options. Now, I do use these, and I do do reviews on these, but I don't use them too often. Kira is generally the go-to. There's a couple missing as well. PrusaSlic3r should be in here somewhere, probably on the other side of my desktop. I'm not going to fish it out, but this section here is my modeling section. So, all of this stuff is stuff that can be used to make models for 3D printing, but the two I want to draw your attention to the most are these two on the left here. Now, these are both free softwares. Autodesk, you do have to sign up for the free version, but Blender is free to just download and use immediately. And then, we are going to be taking a look at a website today as well, and that website is Tinkercad.com. So, I'm just going to go ahead and sign in automatically with my Google account here. Don't mind the... All right, there we go, and don't give me any crap about Google tracking me. I know, maybe they see what I want them to see. You don't know. So, these are a lot of my designs in Tinkercad. You can see a lot of this stuff here is stuff that I just knocked together with this software. I'm basically going to go in and hit creating designs. The first one we're going to try, and it is pretty simple. It is the first one I experimented around with when I started printing as far as CAD software, although my knowledge of Blender does precede my knowledge of either of these CAD softwares we're going to see. So, the nice thing about this is there are primitive shapes. You can drag them. You can drop them in, and basically, you can take other primitive shapes, and I can decide that I want that instead of being solid to be a hole, and then I can select them both using shift, and this little button right here will join them together, which gives me this nice half moon shape. Let's go ahead and actually take this down into a crescent moon. I think that would be kind of cool. Why not? So, what we need to do in order to achieve the effect that I'm talking about here is take this sphere and make it smaller. We also need to make it smaller on the Z. In fact, we only need to make it smaller on the Z. What am I thinking? So, we'll go like this. We'll move it here. Move it. No, you stay there, and you can just go to the top view. It's a little bit easier. There we go, and I want to make it a little bit wider than that on the Z. There we go. Let's turn it into a hole, and again, we'll just shift, select them both, and group them together. Now, we have this funky shape right here. So, you can go in and say I want to print a cylinder that is 22 millimeters wide. You can go in and click the dimension here, and let's say I want it to be 22, and it'll automatically make it that size. Then, you can put it in another cylinder. Say this one's a hole. There we go, and let's click this dimension. We'll make this one 10, and do this one. We'll make it 12, and then you can just edit the height like this instead of messing around with it like I was, and then take that, okay, and join them, and then you have your tube. Now, this is great for making toys. It's great for kids to experiment around with, to play with, and make fun, cool little models, but to be honest, it's not quite powerful enough to be exact to make mechanical models that are accurate to really any sort of degree. I mean, it is possible. You can bring in the ruler, and you can start messing around with all that stuff, but to be honest, it's a lot easier just to open up Fusion 360. Fusion 360 is a great CAD program. It is going take a few minutes to load, and I should have preloaded it, but instead, we're just going to open Blender while we wait because Blender is quick and dirty, and that's the way that I like it. So Blender is a little bit more apt for modeling objects that are going to be more organic objects and not necessarily mechanical. I did want to show you, however, if you wanted to save this, you can hit export in STL, and it'll automatically download it to your download folder wherever that's set to be. This, however, is Blender, and one of the things I like the most about Blender is I'm more familiar with it. To be honest, I've done it for quite a while. Let's do subdivision. Three in the render, three in the viewport. Apply. Let me go to sculpt mode. Zoom in. This is front mode. Basically, let's go to our tools here. Turn on dynamic topology. This might be a lot to look at, but if you're interested in any of these particular softwares, just do a quick search on my channel, and you'll find tutorials for each of them. For exactly what I'm doing, I'm just kind of getting things set up so far. Constant detail, 40. Okay, so symmetry. Okay, I have a mirror on. So basically, I can deform this mesh like this. Now, I started with a basic cube, and I subdivided it so it had more faces, because the more faces you have, the more detailed you can make your drawing, basically. So let's flush this out a little bit. Being a sculpting tool, this generally works a lot better if you have a tablet and a pen or something of that nature, but I do have symmetry turned on, so it should be pretty easy to make a simple face. Look, it's Gargamel from the Smurfs. Totally outdated reference. I can hit shift and do it backwards, and then there are all these different tools and stuff like that for making different shapes, different patterns, and there's different brushes. Now, the reason I like Blender is because I can sculpt, as I said. I'm going to cheat and use my smoothing brush, but there are other softwares that are better at sculpting as well. This is a 3D animation software, so you can make models for games, which I do quite often, and to 3D print. It's not difficult. Let's kind of make a monster here. He's got no eyes. Okay, so it's basically just a lump of clay. It doesn't quite look like a face. Let's fix it real quick. All right, close enough to a face. You can see it, right? Big nose there. So, if I wanted to take this file, which obviously I don't, and print it, I would go to export again and then go to STL. It'll allow me to save it to any folder or file anywhere that I want. I can rename the file then, and then it's just a matter of dragging and dropping that STL into Hero to get it ready to go to slice. Now, the other thing to note here is that if I were to go start a new one, I don't need to save that. You can add stuff, so ctrl shift a, there it is, just shift a. We'll add another cube, and then we can move it. We can size it, put it here, and we can select both of these objects, and then shift j will join them, and I can actually go into edit mode just by hitting tab. Now, this is not sculpting. This is just selecting different transforms and moving them. Right now, I'm moving the point itself. I can also select a line and move a line, or I can select the face and move a face, and this way I can manipulate objects in all sorts of ways. Once I have it the way I want it, it is one solid object, I can go down here and do that subdivide trick again. That's too many. Okay, so, but that's a good way to make primitive geometry, and then you can edit it using sculpting, but of course you'll have to subdivide it quite a bit more or use that dynamic topology I was talking about, but there is a lot you can do here, and making models in Blender is fun. They are just a little bit more freeform than with a traditional CAD type of software. Let's discard the changes there, and Fusion 360 is opening. There you have it. This is one of my favorites. I make pieces for my other printers with this all of the time, and it is pretty much amazing. It's super powerful software, and like I said, you can get it completely for free. There is a video about that on my channel as well, so if you're looking into getting it or you need some software, definitely search the channel for the tutorial on how to get it for free and how to download it, install it, and some use tutorials as well. Alright, and here we have it. Welcome to Fusion 360. The first thing we need to do to make a model in Fusion 360 is to create a sketch. You can sketch on pretty much any flat surface, and then either extrude that object or put that through an object making a hole, kind of like Tinkercad, but the elements you have here to control it are a lot more refined, so I can add dimensions to pretty much anything. I'm going to try to click on the bottom plane, but I'm going to go ahead and close Cura. I have a couple of them open. There we go. It brings us square with that plane, so we're looking straight at it. Let's say I need to make a bracket. I can go ahead and grab my rectangle, and let's make this 65 tall by 130, so twice as wide as it is tall. If I wanted to be particular and make sure this ended up in the grid square there, I could go to create and select one of these other rectangles, like center rectangle, and click there and then drag it out, but it doesn't really matter. It'll move with me, so I can zoom in and zoom out. Right now, this is just a drawing. There's no actual object represented here. Let's put some interesting geometry in here so you can see how cool this is, and we'll make some Swiss cheese. All right, so not being exact about that at all, I'm going to hit finish sketch, and then I'm going to go ahead and select this plane here, which is all of those holes removed, and hit this button, which is going to extrude. I can either drag it out here, or I can type in a value there, and I can also add a taper here, so I can make the hole smaller or bigger, and they don't have to be holes. They can be pretty much any object, so something this is really useful for is we'll finish this sketch. We'll make a little bracket here because that's what I said I use it for, so I made it two millimeters thick. You can make it as thick as you want. That's thick enough for me. Now, I'm going to select the top surface, and I'm going to create another sketch, and with this sketch, I'm going to do two rectangles. Size for me doesn't matter, but if I was building an actual bracket, this is something that would be measured. I can hit finish and get a little bit better view, and I can even hit extrude first and then select the multiple things I want to extrude. We'll just go just like that. Now, at this point, there are two things I can do. If I want to put a hole in here, I can create a sketch with a circle that's that size, and I can push it back through there and extrude it backwards, or I can hit hole here, select face, and then drag the hole to where I want it, and this allows me to make holes for objects like drills and screws and things like that. It'll allow me to determine how deep the hole is. Let's say one, and it just barely pokes out the back, and that's because of the angle here, so you can change that as well. I can change the thickness of that. I can change it so it's a flat drill point and make it really, really tiny. There you go. That is a one millimeter hole. Let's go back and reselect it since I want to keep editing it, and I can edit this feature, and this is how wide it is. This is the width here, so let's make a four millimeter hole, and I think we can go a little deeper than that, so let's edit again, and we will make it, and it updates on the fly, so let's do that. Four millimeter deep hole just right there. I could go all the way through the back side if I wanted to drill a screw this to something, but for now that's it. It's a basic little block object. You can use your dimensions to make pretty much anything you want, and this is what I do quite often, so if I want to export it first, I have to save it in Fusion 360, and then I can click file, export, and then go down here in the type and select STL. Then I'll hit export, and it does take some time. You can see the status here. When it's done, it'll give me the option to show it in the folder. I'll normally click on that and then just drag it from there right into Kira. We're not going to do all that right now. This is just to kind of show you a couple of programs that could do modeling if you want. I definitely recommend taking a look at Blender and Fusion 360, but Tinkercad, as I said, is also a good place to start and see what you can make, so that's going to be it for this video, guys. Don't forget to leave a like down below and hit that subscribe button. There's going to be a lot more in this series coming up. It's pretty much going to be a daily thing for the next few days while we get ready some other printers that we have just received and do our testing for the review process for those, so stay tuned, and we'll see you next time. Well, that's it, guys. That's going to wrap up this video. If you've noticed the shirt, the merch is available. Go ahead and check out the Teespring merch link down below. It won't be available on a channel store until I reach 10,000 subscribers, and so far I am just about to hit 5,000, so it'll be a little while, a couple more months before you see this on the actual channel, but they are available now. I have a couple other designs. Feel free to pop over there and check them out and know that any purchase through the Teespring site definitely helps to promote our site here and increase the channel's ability to make videos in the future, so we appreciate all your support. Don't forget to check out the Teespring link. Check out our Patreon link. Leave a like on this video and hit that subscribe button because we have a lot more coming at you in the coming days.