3D Printing the 1930 House we Renovated (as an architect)

Hey friends, welcome back. In today's video, I wanted to 3D print the model of this house. Well, not really this one, but the renovated version of it. So this is also a bit of a sneak peek because it's a real project, a 1930 house we've renovated from top to bottom, and I'm about to take you through that whole renovation in a new series very soon. So think of this little model as the finished house. We will see basically how a 3D printer works, how to get a 3D model ready to be printed, and a little bit of crafting at the end to finish the model. Just so you know, I'm not a 3D printing expert. I'm an architect who likes trying new things. So if you have no real idea how a 3D printer works, I think you will just enjoy this one. Okay, let's start. Making the model printable. As I didn't originally plan to 3D print this house, I didn't really have a clean model ready. I built this one while we were designing the renovation, so the measurements are all correct. That's why I use this as my base. But a model you make for design is not ready to be printed. It's not clean. And by clean, I mean there shouldn't be anything in it you don't need. It should be modeled as simple as possible with all the unnecessary lines removed. When you are designing, you can cheat a little. A wall can just be a flat surface with no real thickness, because on the screen it still reads as a wall. But a 3D printer needs something solid. If there is a gap, a hole, or a wall with no thickness, the printer simply doesn't know what to build. So the first job was going through the whole model and fixing all of that. Giving every wall a real thickness, closing the gaps, and making the whole thing solid. This is a really important step. And by the way, I'm using Sketchup on my laptop here for the modeling, but you can use anything you like as long as you can export an STL file. Splitting it in two parts. If I wanted to, I could just 3D print the whole house in one piece and that's it. But my goal was to be able to open it up and see inside each floor, so I'm dividing the house into three parts. This first one is the main entrance, with a little living room and kitchen. This one is where the rooms are on the first floor, and this last one is a separate studio which is attached to the main house. I offset the top wall of one part and the bottom wall of the next so they could sit on top of each other and click into place in a satisfying way. At least, I hope. Honestly, I don't know if that would be enough, but we will see. Splitting it up turned out to be a good thing anyway because it means you can see inside and then put everything back together at the end, a bit like a little puzzle. Printing. Once the parts were ready, I created a separate Sketchup file for each one and exported them as STL files. Then I opened Bamboo Studio, which is the 3D printing slicer developed by Bamboo Lab. Basically, a slicer takes your 3D model and converts it into instructions the printer can actually understand. Here we have a few tabs. First, I go to Prepare, then I upload my file, and we can see it here. It looks very tiny right now, so let's change the scale to make it fit. If I tap here, it places the model on the plate automatically. And you can see the Bamboo Lab is connected here. Now let's choose the filament, which is the raw plastic the printer uses. The printer feeds the filament into a heated nozzle where it melts and gets laid down layer by layer to build the object. That's basically how it works. Then I click on Slice Plate, so it cuts the model into thin layers, generates the printer path, creates the supports, and estimates the print time. This is great because you can inspect the print layer by layer and check that the supports and the infill look right before you print anything. And when I say supports, I mean those temporary structures the printer builds to hold the parts of the model that would otherwise be printed in mid-air. They are just there so the model prints correctly and you take them off once it's done. So that's it. Now we can click Print Plate and the printer starts. Now we just watch it slowly build the model layer by layer, putting it together. Then I print the other parts too and here they all are. Once everything was printed, I cleaned the parts up and started assembling. And slowly the whole house came together. That little offset I left so the pieces could click, not quite enough it turns out, but it's okay, it doesn't look too bad. Next, I printed the roofs and the windows. For the windows, I just modeled really basic frames, laid them out flat, and adjusted the scale a bit so I could place them easily into the openings. Look how cute these are. I'm going to color them because the frames chosen for the house are a nice anthracite and the closest I have here is black, so black it is. And ta-da! While I do that, I keep printing the shutters. I will color them in a wood tone. The closest one I have is this one and let's glue them on. These are so cute. Now let's color the roofs too. I really hope I won't regret this. Okay, turned out fine. Not bad, right? And finally, I printed a little base to sit the house on so it doesn't slide around everywhere. And that's it! It was honestly easier than I expected. I really like how it looks, it's actually very fun and I would probably add a few more details later, some plants and maybe furniture. So that's the model, but like I said, this house has a whole story behind it. It's a 1930 house we renovated and it had a lot of problems, but somehow we pulled it off and honestly, I can't wait to show you all of that. So make sure you are subscribed so you don't miss the series and tell me in the comments what did you think of this 3D model. I would love to know. If you still got some time, you can watch this video right here and I will see you in the next one. Bye!