3D Printing News Briefs: October 18, 2019

The stories we’re sharing in today’s 3D Printing News Briefs run the gamut from materials to new printers. Altair has launched its new industrial design solution, and Remet opened a metal 3D printing lab in Poland. Innofil3D is sharing lots of material news, and Equispheres has released the test results for a unique 3D printing powder. Finally, Hackaday published a micro 3D printer project.

Altair Launches New Industrial Design and Rendering Solution

The “Geko Ring Collection,” jewelry by Luca Palmini, designed and rendered with Inspire Studio. Image courtesy of Luca Palmini.

Global technology company Altair has launched Inspire Studio, its new 3D design and rendering solution, to help architects, designers, and digital artists create, evaluate, and visualize designs. The solution builds on the functions of Altair Evolve, and includes 3D rendering and animation software Inspire Render, which helps users rapidly generate photorealistic product renderings and animations. Both Inspire Studio and Inspire Render run on MacOS and Windows, and help designers open up their creativity to go beyond traditional CAID tools. The solutions will be introduced next month during a one-day launch event in Italy, and you can also get a free ticket to formnext 2019, where you can learn more about Inspire Studio and Inspire Render at Altair’s booth E11, hall 11.1.

“We are very pleased with these two new solutions for the global industrial design community. Inspire Studio builds on our previous industrial design tool, Evolve, while going beyond Evolve’s capabilities. Inspire Studio will enhance designers’ creativity by letting them drive their designs. It offers an intuitive user interface and a powerful construction history, allowing them to quickly create and explore multiple iterations of their design. Relying on the same modern user experience with powerful interactive, full progressive and raytracing rendering engine, Inspire Render will help designers quickly run photorealistic renderings and walkthrough animations on GPUs and CPUs,” said James Dagg, CTO at Altair.

3D Design and Rendering Software | Altair Inspire Studio

Remet Opens Modern Metal 3D Printing Laboratory

Polish steel structures manufacturer for the oil and gs mining industry, Remet, has launched a metal 3D printing laboratory equipped with a range of high quality machines and devices. The first of these is the DMP Flex 350 by 3D Systems, followed by 3D Systems’ Figure 4, the office-friendly metallic powder atomizer ATO Lab, and plenty of other specialized research equipment. Remet completed the project together with 3D Lab, a top Polish industrial 3D printer distributor and manufacturer of the ATO Lab.

The ATO Lab metal atomizer, which enables testing and fabrication of many powdered metal alloys, was the starting point for this unique laboratory. A new branch of the enterprise, called Remet Metal Labs, is where the company will work on comprehensive additive manufacturing and industrial applications projects. Its goal is to create highly flexible conditions for creating prototypes in the powder production field, and automotive, aviation, and space industry customers are invited to work with Remet to take advantage of the lab. 3D Lab and Remet will present their solutions together at formnext in Frankfurt next month.

Innofil3D Materials and Design Rules Video

This week, Innofil3D, and its parent company BASF, have a lot of news to share. First up, Ultrafuse BVOH, its water-soluble support filament, is now available for purchase, along with its new Ultrafuse 316L metal filament. Designed for easy FFF 3D printing, this is the company’s first metal material – 80% stainless steel with a 20% polymer content.

For users interested in 3D printing their Innofil3D PRO1 filament on a Raise3D printer, you can now join the Raise3D Open Filament Program to take advantage of optimized settings and print profiles. This new program is a collaboration between Raise3D and filament manufacturers, like Innofil3D, to find the top-performing materials for its 3D printers. Finally, Innofil3D has released its second video tutorial for design rules and principles of FFF 3D printing. Check out the video below, and be sure to visit BASF at its large K-Fair exhibit in Hall 5, C21/D21.

Equispheres Releases Test Results for Unique AM Powder

Materials science technology company Equispheres has released the results from its first powder testing phase, completed by a facility that certifies AM materials for applications in aerospace and defense. The results have confirmed that the powder has exceeded expectations, allowing for a 20-30% increase in mechanical performance and a 50% increase in production speeds. In light of this news, Equispheres is launching new equity financing in order to, as the company wrote in a press release, “grow and unlock the vast potential of Additive Manufacturing.”

“The unique properties of our powder, including the high sphericity, narrow particle size distribution and low surface area results in significantly increased packing density.  This allows an increase of powder layer thickness by a factor of 2 which significantly increases build speed. Most importantly, this boost to build speed does not come with a mechanical performance penalty.  Instead, the uniform nature of our powder ensures that parts are produced with reliable and consistent mechanical properties.  The minimal variance in our performance results provides design engineers the statistical confidence to produce stronger, lighter parts,” said Equispheres’ CTO, Dr Martin Conlon.

Hackaday Project: Micro Deltesian 3D Printer

A new Hackaday project by architect Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi was just published – a micro Deltesian 3D printer, which he says offers a quality that’s on par with any Cartesian 3D printer. The printer has a solid aluminum frame, with a standard slider Y axis and a Delta mechanism for the XZ axis. A 3.5″ LCD touchscreen, with a built-in SD card, is fast and easy enough for his young daughter to use, which was his ultimate goal. With an 80 x 100 x 85 mm build volume and a print bed held in place with magnets, the biggest challenge in making the minuscule 3D printer easy to use was the filament loading; Singh Kalsi used a lever-based latch mechanism for this.

“the micro deltesian was born out of the curiosity of building the convoluted deltesian mechanism,” he explained. “Later on it evolved into the idea of building a 3d printer simple enough to be used by my daughter. The deltesian mechanism seem very wierd when i first saw it but eventually i thought maybe i should give it a try and hence this printer was born.”

Watch the video below to see just how easily his daughter uses the micro Deltesian 3D printer:

Discuss these stories and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below. 

The post 3D Printing News Briefs: October 18, 2019 appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing.

Just in Time: Last-Minute Holiday Gifts

Need a last-minute gift for a special person on your holiday list?  You can create a unique, custom 3D-printed clock with just a little bit of design knowledge and an inexpensive battery-powered clock kit like this $8 Youngtown Silent Clock Mechanism with Small Hands:

You’ve got from now to the second week of December to get a 3D design together, if you want to order a 3D print before the Shapeways Material Cut-Off Dates for the holidays. In this post we’ll show you how you can create a custom 3D-printable clock face with three different software programs. Don’t have time for that? Skip to the end to see how you can customize a retro clock very quickly with our Sunburst Clock Maker.

Beginner: Tinkercad

Even if you’ve never created a 3D design before, it’s easy to get started with Tinkercad, a free in-browser 3D design tool with a simple drag-and-drop interface. To get started, sign up for a free account and check out the All3DP video Getting Started in Tinkercad: A Tutorial for Complete Beginners. Once you know a few Tinkercad tricks, you can create complex designs from very simple combinations of shapes; throughout this post we’ll link to helpful YouTube videos to show you exactly what you need to know.

To make a simple clock in Tinkercad, we’ll start with a cylinder for the center face, and then create a couple of stretched-out rings with Rotated “Round Roof” shapes and Holes:

By using the “Control-D” duplication tool we can copy and rotate those rings in a pattern around the cylinder. After modifying the heights of each shape with the Ruler, we get a simple retro clock face design:

If you want to pick apart our Tinkercad design and see how it works, just open this Quick Clock link and tinker for yourself! Add some Text for numbers, if you like, or design something new from scratch. When you’re ready to download your design for 3D printing, click the “Export” button and then choose “Export as STL”.

Intermediate: Fusion 360

To make a fancier custom clock, try Autodesk’s Fusion 360 3D software, which is free for students, educators, and hobbyists. There’s a steeper learning curve to get started in Fusion 360 than there is with Tinkercad, but there are plenty of video tutorials online to help you learn. Some of the best are the Fusion 360 tutorials by Maker’s Muse. We’ll link to relevant video tutorials throughout this section so that you can learn just what you need. Fusion 360 is a very powerful program with a lot of features and tools, but you only need to know how to use a few of those tools to make a simple clock!

For example, if you know how to create a Sketch, add Constraints, and use a Circular Pattern, then you have all the tools you need to create a 2D shape for a clock face design in Fusion 360. To create the example below we started a Sketch, added a Circle at the origin, then formed spoke shapes with Lines. We kept the shapes symmetric by using Constraints, and rotated them in a Pattern around the origin. In the screenshot below we are in the process of duplicating and rotating the thinnest spoke to create twelve copies of it around the center circle:

Most models in Fusion 360 start from a two-dimensional Sketch like the one above. Once you’re done with your Sketch you can Extrude to give it some three-dimensional depth, and then Fillet the edges to make them rounded and professional-looking:

To download your model for 3D printing, right-click on the gray name of your model in the Browser menu (if you haven’t saved your Fusion 360 design yet, then the name of the model will be “(Untitled)”, as it is in the screenshot above). Select “Save as STL”, click “OK” in the new window that pops up, and save the STL file to your computer.

Advanced: Make ALL THE CLOCKS

Feeling more ambitious? With some parametric design you can write OpenSCAD code to generate billions of clocks, each from a random seed. For example, consider the many types of retro-styled “Sunburst” or “Starburst” clocks shown in this Google Image search:

Clocks like these were inspired by the modernist-style work of industrial designer George Nelson, who made many variations of such clocks in the 1950s. There are some common design features that are shared by most of these clocks: geometrically-shaped spokes, a star/sunburst pattern, a circular inside for the hands… Here’s what our first notes looked like when we started thinking about the typical parts and designs for Sunburst Clocks, and some of our early test prints:

OpenSCAD is a free code-based design software that works on any platform. With just a little bit of coding knowledge you can write simple code to describe a library of geometric spoke shapes, and then options for rotating those shapes around a central circle. There are literally billions of configurations; here are just a few:

If you want to learn more about OpenSCAD, check out our beginner’s video tutorial PolyBowls – A simple OpenSCAD code walkthrough and intro document Hello OpenSCAD. The “Hello” document has a link to sample code you can inspect and modify; if you want to play around with the code that made the clocks in the rotating image above, you can download it from our Thingiverse page.

The Easy Way Out: Customize a Sunburst Clock

But… you may be thinking… there is NO TIME FOR THIS!! The holidays are coming fast, and you don’t have time to learn how to write parametric OpenSCAD code right now? No problem, just use our Customzier to design your own retro clock! We’ve made our design free on Thingiverse so you can create unique and interesting Sunburst Clocks in just a few seconds. Just go to the design on Thingiverse and click the “Open in Customizer” button to get started (you’ll have to sign up for a free Thingiverse/MakerBot account to open the design in Customizer):

The Customizer version of the Sunburst Clock design lets you create new clocks just by clicking in the Random Seed slider and selecting design options from drop-down menus. You can also set the overall shape and size of your clock, and control the center hole and backing to match your clock kit:

Once you have the clock you want, click the “Create Thing” button and download the STL file from your list of Things within Thingiverse. Here is a design we made with the Customizer and had printed at Shapeways in White Versatile Plastic for less than $30 (it’s the “Cordelia” design), together with the clock mechanism we’ll use to assemble the final clock:

After assembly, the clock looks like this:

And here’s an “action” shot on the wall:

Light Speed: Order an Existing Design

If you’re really down to the wire and don’t have time to create or customize your own design, then quickly head over to the Shapeways Marketplace for a huge selection of unique 3D printed gifts that you can order right away. If it’s before the December 13 cutoff date for medium-sized White Versatile Plastic at Shapeways, then you still have time to order, with next-day shipping and priority manufacturing, one of our best twelve pre-made retro clock designs from the geekhaus shop, like the Velma:

Happy making, and happy holidays!

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11 Things to Check Before Sending Your 3D Model for Printing

So, you’ve turned your vision into a reality and created a 3D model. It took a bit of tinkering and adjusting but you’re finally happy with your design and you’re ready to send it to the printer. But wait – even though your model automatically went through Shapeways’ own printability checks upon upload, there are still a few tests and checks that you can run to make sure your printing is as smooth as possible. To ensure your model isn’t hampered by any weak walls, muddied details, or fused parts, review our 11 checklist items below to learn more about what makes a successful print, and don’t forget to follow the design guidelines for your specific material. For more expert guides, subscribe to our newsletter!

Your Pre-Print Checklist

Use this checklist as a tool to prepare your model for 3D printing and put your mind at ease.

  1. Design for your material
    Each checklist item applies differently to each material. The material design guidelines are your primary resource for designing 3D printable products.
  2. Check wall & wire thickness
    Every part of your model must be thick enough to be 3D printed, survive post-production, and be safely packed and shipped. Learn more about printing strong and sturdy models.
  3. Create escape holes for hollow models
    Excess material, such as nylon powder for our Strong & Flexible Plastic, must be able to escape from hollow models. The material guidelines describe the required escape holes for each material—when in doubt, lean towards more and/or larger escape holes.
  4. Check balance and weight
    A model must be designed for real-world physics. Be sure to account for weight distribution, and the model’s ability to support its own weight.
  5. Protect vulnerable areas
    Outstretched elements, such as wires or appendages on figurines, could snap off during or after printing if the joint is not strong enough. Add extra support to these areas to help prevent breakages in the production process.
  6. Adjust model scale
    You likely had to specify the scale of your model (meters, millimeters, inches) before uploading your model, but it’s always smart to check those dimensions one more time to make sure they meet your expectations before you order.
  7. Ensure clearance for moving parts
    Moving parts need clearance between one another to function properly. This is especially important when designing for Strong & Flexible Plastic—without enough clearance, the parts will fuse together during the print process.  The Material Guidelines have specific information on clearance requirements for the material you plan to use.
  8. Make sure details are large enough
    Embossed and engraved details have minimum requirements to ensure they print clearly. Those specifics are listed in the Material Guidelines.
  9. Compensate for smoothing modifiers (if applicable)
    3D printers do not read smoothing modifiers, so instead, sub-divide your mesh to replicate the effect of smoothing.
  10. Optimize your colors
    If designing for Full Color Sandstone, check that your Shapeways render matches your expectations. CMYK is best at producing bright, well defined colors.
  11. Don’t forget to read our content policy
    We encourage the endless possibilities of your creativity but ask that your designs respect our content policy.

 

Once your model checks out, you’re ready to bring your design to life!

 

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3D Printing Strong and Sturdy Models

Sometimes a digital 3D design looks great in your software, but just can’t make it in reality. Here in the real world, a 3D model can only be so thin or fragile; models with very skinny wires or delicate parts might break after printing, or worse, not be able to 3D print at all. In this post, we’ll examine how auto-checks, human checks, and prototyping can help you design models that print successfully and are sturdy enough to handle repeated use or handling.

Auto-Checks

Shapeways provides guidelines and auto-checks to ensure that your uploaded models are printable in each material. For example, models created at Shapeways in Versatile Plastic are 3D printed in a durable nylon material in large batches using an industrial Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) printer. Versatile plastic has an intense post production process that includes extraction from powder and other models, cleaning and polishing, and even dying in different colors. Thin or narrow models can be easily broken or separated during post production. You can refer to the Design Guidelines for Versatile Plastic to determine how thin you can make the wires in your model. Here’s what those guidelines say about two success parameters, wall thickness and wire thickness:

In the guidelines above, “walls” are flat surfaces in your model and “wires” are more like strands. Notice that the recommended minimum for supported wires (those that connect to your model nearby on both ends) is 0.8mm. Processed models are put through a polisher, and Premium models are polished even more, so their minimum is higher: 0.9mm. Finally, the minimum for unsupported wires (which don’t inherit as much stability from the rest of the model) is even larger, at 1.0mm.

After you upload your model, Shapeways will perform a series of auto-checks to measure the thickness of walls and wires, among other things. If you click on “View 3D Tools” (or “View Issues”, if your uploaded model failed any checks) from within any Material view of your model, Shapeways will show you the results of these auto-checks. Here’s what that looked like for an early demo version of our Deltoidal Icositetrahedron model:

Although this model passed the Wire Thickness check, it fails the Wall Thickness check. The flattened notes at the vertices, and even some of the long wires, are considered “walls” here, and they aren’t thick enough to get over the 0.7mm minimum thickness requirement.

Checking and Fixing Thickness Issues

You can check the thickness of your model in whatever design software you used to create it. Or, another easy way to determine the minimum thicknesses of your design is to import your model to Meshmixer and use the Thickness tool in the Analysis menu. You can then use Meshmixer to make your design thicker, if needed, by selecting the model and then using Edit > Extrude (using the Normal Direction) or Edit > Offset to expand your model outwards or inwards. To thicken only selected parts of your model, you can take the more targeted approach described in our previous article Tutorial Tuesday 50: Using Meshmixer to Make 3D Models Thick Enough to 3D Print.

Prototyping

Even if your model passes printability checks, it’s worth printing a demo model to make sure that everything is okay. Sometimes, weak geometry can’t be determined until a model is actually printed and in your hand. Even if the print comes out successfully, it may be too delicate to hold up to its intended use. After our example model failed printability checks, we redesigned it so that it would just barely pass the checks and print successfully. It was a beautiful model, but it wasn’t long before it broke and warped:

I guess the moral of this story is: For best results, don’t try to just *barely* meet the print requirements; rather, make sure you are safely above them.

It’s worth pointing out that the size of the model itself matters as much as the thickness; the two go hand-in-hand. In the image above, the smaller model has the same wire thickness but is actually quite sturdy. The larger model is weaker because the wires are longer and have to hold up to greater stress when the model is handled. This means when prototyping, you can’t always get an accurate impression of the strength of your model by shrinking your model down, or designing a smaller version. Think about it this way: a wireframe model the size of your head will need a larger wire thickness than a model the size of your pinky!

In the end, we decided to thicken up our Deltoidal Icositetrahedron model significantly. The final version looks like the blue model on the right in the image below. It’s much stronger, and the cost of printing was only increased by a few dollars.

Human Checks

Sometimes models pass the online checks at Shapeways, but then fail a secondary check when they are actually ordered for printing. That’s because actual human beings at Shapeways check your model manually while they prepare it for 3D printing. They check for things that require a lot more expertise than the automatic computer checks, like how large your model is, how the different pieces of it fit together, and a lot of things that you or I might not think of. If they notice a problem then they will email you, and try to suggest ways that you can modify your model to increase the likelihood that it will print successfully.

Keep in mind that the printing engineers at Shapeways want to make sure that your model can print correctly not just once, but over and over. A model that passes the auto-checks and listed guidelines may have weak areas that may not break on the first print, but are likely to break the second or third time. This means that even if your print comes out well in a “Print it Anyway” situation, it still might not be stable enough to offer as an item in the Marketplace. Variations in print stability can arise from small differences in the printing and finishing process, like how the models are packed or oriented in the machines, or how it interacts with other models in the polisher.

As an example, consider our Hoop Knot Earring:

According to the Design Guidelines for Silver, we needed to make the wires at least 1mm in diameter. However, it’s best to exceed that significantly; consider that Silver models from Shapeways are 3D printed in wax, cast in Silver using lost wax casting, and then finished and polished. All of those procedures could damage a model with weak geometry. When we uploaded our Hoop Knot Earring for printing, it passed all of the auto-checks. But when we tried to order a print of it in Silver, the kind and knowledgeable human engineers at Shapeways said that the geometry of our model was too weak. They suggested adding connectors and even emailed me this helpful illustration:

Of course, in this case I couldn’t add connectors since that would have ruined the design; instead I had to make the wires thicker to give the model more stability. That resulted in the print shown below on the right. Later I tried to make a larger version, shown on the left, but an interesting thing happened; since the wires had to travel further, they were more prone to bending and becoming misshapen when I opened and closed the earring. Even though the larger model had thicker wires, in the end it didn’t work as well as a functional item.

In the end, you’ll have to use a combination of your own design analysis, automatic printability checks, manual printability checks, and physical prototyping to successfully print delicate or geometrically complex models. If you’ve got your own tips and tricks that help you through this process, let us know!

 

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Is your 3D model a mess? Make it printable!

What do you do when your 3D model is broken? I mean really broken, like “can’t even upload it” broken, or “half of my triangles are disappearing” broken? In this post we’ll talk about what to do when your usual mesh-repairing strategies fail and you need to bring out the big guns.

Let’s do this by example. So that we can follow exactly what’s going wrong, we’ll create a bad mesh by modifying an existing 3D model, my Deltoidal Hexecontahedron Catalan Bracelet:

We’re going to turn this into a tealight ring and add some solid faces to the wireframe to create a partially-enclosed look. The screenshot below shows what it looked like when I did this in TopMod; I added the closed triangle faces, and everything seems fine:

Nice! But when we try to upload to Shapeways, we get this error message:

First line of defense: Meshmixer

Meshmixer is a great first tool for modifying 3D meshes; for an in-depth example see our previous article Tutorial Tuesday 50: Using Meshmixer to Make 3D Models Thick Enough to 3D Print. But, in this case, when we open our broken file in Meshmixer to see what’s going wrong, the faces don’t load in. Although Meshmixer knows something is wrong here, its Inspector cannot repair it:

Second line of defense: MeshLab

Another great mesh-manipulation tool is MeshLab; for a primer on making simple mesh fixes with MeshLab, check out our previous article Tutorial Tuesday 5: Quick Fixes With MeshLab. It’s more complicated than Meshmixer, but can often take care of bad geometry like reversed normals and non-manifold faces. However, when we try to open our broken file in MeshLab we get this error:

After opening the file and looking through some of the Cleaning & Repairing filters, we see that there are some non-manifold faces:

The problem lies with where the new faces intersect. When we added those new triangles, we created some bad geometry where the pairs of coincident faces meet.  Alas, although MeshLab can identify these problems, it’s not able to actually fix them; usual MeshLab repair menu options such as “Remove Faces from Nonmanifold Edges” and “Remove T-Vertices by Edge Flip” are unsuccessful here.

The big guns: MakePrintable

If you have a Windows machine, you can try using the professional software Netfabb to repair this model. Netfabb is free for students, but for the rest of us it costs $30, per month. For professionals in industry this is probably reasonable, but for smaller businesses and hobbyists it’s pretty steep.

Luckily, with any platform and for no money at all you can have access to the extremely powerful mesh-repair services at MakePrintable. MakePrintable’s free cloud-based repair service lets you upload models to repair on their servers, and then download up to three repaired models per month. If you need more repairs than that, then for just $10 per month you can upgrade to their Pro service to get access to more features and unlimited downloads. Since Meshmixer and MeshLab can handle lots of simple mesh problems, the three-a-month restriction is not so bad. But does it work? The answer is YES, and in fact in my experience I have NEVER had a model that MakePrintable couldn’t repair. That includes successfully repairing my Tentacle Bowl, which was made from thousands of recursively-generated overlapping spheres that resulted in very broken internal geometry.

Let’s see what MakePrintable can do with our model. MakePrintable is a cloud-based service that works entirely in your browser, so to get started you just go to makeprintable.com:

Opening and repairing models is free in MakePrintable; it’s only the final download that counts against your monthly total. This means that we can upload our file and see if MakePrintable will fix our file without risking anything. When we upload our model, MakePrintable immediately recognizes its 20 non-manifold edges. Along the right sidebar are a number of fancy options for the Pro/Paid version, but for our purposes we can just use the default free settings.

So, can MakePrintable fix this bad geometry? Yes! Note in the image below that the right-hand model has no non-manifold edges anymore, so we should be in the clear. To download the repaired mesh, choose Save/Export, then 3D Model, then your filetype, then save the file to your computer. This action will reduce your three-a-month download count, so be sure you are happy with the repair before downloading.

In this case our initial broken mesh was very simple, and MakePrintable’s repaired mesh was much finer, with many more triangles. We could have controlled that if we were using the Pro/Paid version, but in this case we can reduce the mesh in Meshmixer and then run through mesh styling TopMod to get exactly the blocky-smooth style we want, which looks like this:

Fixed and ready for Shapeways

Our repaired and remeshed model now uploads to Shapeways, and we can order 3D prints of fancy Deltoidal Hexecontahedron Tealight Rings. Here’s what they look like after printing and photographing for our geekhaus store:

This was just a simple example with a handful of faces and edges causing bad geometry; it can of course get much, much worse. Do you have a broken model? Give these tools a try then upload your model again. Let us know how it goes!

Upload My Model button

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