Step 4 (optional) – remove unnecessary elements Now you can have an idea of how you object will fit inside your printer. In this way it will not be shown during the renderings and it will not be possible for you to select it from the 3D View. Now we are ready to forget about it: in the Outliner, change the name from Cube to Working area (or the name you prefer) and click on the arrow and the camera icon. Move the box so that it occupies the center of the scene. Now you will always see only the wire-frame of your box. Go to the Display panel of the Object settings and change the Maximum draw type from Textured to Wire. Now we have a big cube in our scene, not really what we want. We will use the printing area of a ZMorph 2SX: 250 x 235 x 165 mm. Step 3 (optional) – Display the printing areaĬreate a new cube or set, through the Transform Properties Panel , the dimensions of the default one to the ones of your printer.

The next steps are encouraged but totally optional. This is all you have to do to use Blender for 3D printing. That’s it! Now you can press CTRL + U to save these settings as default. It’s also a good idea to increase the number of Lines, for example to 30. Personally I prefer the units of the grid to be cm, so I type 0.01.

If you want that each square of the grid represents a mm, put the scale to 0.001. To fix this press N to display the Transform Properties Panel (if it’s not already there) and scroll down to the Display section. Change the units to Imperial or Metric. We will use millimeters, hence we choose Metric with a Scale of 0.001.īecause of the previous step, the default grid became so big that you cannot even see it.

Go the Units panel, in the Scene settings. These are the steps:īlender by default uses Blender units, but if we want to have an exact idea of how big will be the model that we are going to print, we need to uses real-world units. Within the many, you can use it to create and prepare models for 3D printing and other digital manufacturing techniques, like CNC milling. Blender doesn’t come ready for 3D printing, but setting it up is quite straightforward, in this article we will see how.īlender is an amazing open source project, the amount of projects you can realize with it is astonishing.

Blender 3d printing tutorial