Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mills]

Agreed, Janro - I was sure that was Raxx's work when I saw the pic!

Glad you got the printer working, Raxx, it sounds pretty cool! I look forward to seeing some of the output.

[Maximilianibus]

i'd like to get a print, too ^^

[Raxx]

Aw, now I'm starting to feel bad about not modeling anything

Maximilianibus, you're added to the list and now there is 1 slot left!

[headwax]

Heya Raxx, well my admiration for you just grows in leaps and bounds (2mm increments) What a marvelous thing you have done. It's wonderful to bridge the huge chasm between gunna and actually 'do' - and it looks like you have done a magnificent job!

Thank you for your kind offer! I'm not sure if I have anything worthy at the moment .
Really looking forward to what $imon et all come up with.

heck, it's not often I wish I were rich - or smart enough to make something like this!
but this time I do....

!

[Raxx]

Well headwax, you have a spot reserved regardless, if you have a model you'd like to see in real life you can email it to me and I'll do the conversion work for you. Special treatment due to that challenge way back that you won third second place in

As for costs and smarts, well. If you are patient and hunt down good deals then you can build one for around $400. But as time goes by, newer versions of the reprap are being developed where they are cheaper and easier to build. I'm sure one day you will have a printer sitting on your desk.

As it happens, I had printed a model out a few months ago, before I had to take a break from the printer. I believe the layer height was around 0.3mm, so know that more than likely the level of detail will be 1.3 times better (assuming your models are printed at 0.2mm)

 

The dog model was a quick sculpture done in sculptris that was then poly-reduced to make the slicing program run faster. After it printed I tested my airbrush on it, resulting in the...um...spectacular paint job.

[$imon]

Hey Raxx, sorry to hear about the broken piece!
Not so sorry too because now we have some more time

You said you reduced the poly amount before printing for the dog, is a high poly count a problem? What would you say is about an acceptable limit for the models to be printed?
I think the dog came out pretty cool!

[ENSONIQ5]

This is a truly awesome concept, and it's awesome of you to offer to construct members' models, Raxx.  I have gone through all my models and none that would be worthy of reality meet the angle criteria, even after breaking them up.  Apparently I have a predilection for stupid levels of detail and complexity!  However, I am fascinated by this concept and I am looking forward to seeing images and videos.  A researcher I work with has built a very similar machine, he works with a larger (big $$$) machine which is used to model mathematical concepts (I know, bizarre right?) but wanted a small, cheapish machine to play with.  He has managed to do some pretty amazing things with it and recently managed to print the logo of the organisation we work for in two colours, blue and white, swapping over the filament between the colours.  He has posted time-lapse videos and images on our internal chatter system, I'll see if I can get them off and post them here for interest's sake.

[Janro]

Like ENSONIQ, I went through the models I had in store and well they don't quite meet the requirement. I might try and model a character of mine with that in mind, but it'll be the first time I'd do without a rig. I never really did flat out sculpting before.

P.S. (and really off topic sorry >< ) I forget, I want to share some work just to show what I've been up to, but it's not done in Anim8or. Do we have a place here for that?

[Raxx]

$imon: I had a feeling that statement would bring up questions A complex model simply takes longer to slice. As far as I know, there could be a couple of million polygons and it wouldn't hang up, it'd just take a while depending on how many layers it has to slice the model into and the kind of fill pattern it'll use. After the poly reduction, the dog was still in at around 26k triangles. Time-wise it's not much of an issue since there will be a lot of downtime while waiting for the models to print, and I can do other stuff in the meantime.

ENSONIQ5: Yeah filament swapping for different colors is cool, but not entirely accurate just yet, and I don't have any other color at the moment. There is some work being tested on making a multi-color extruder, you can see their attempts so far here. I'll reserve a spot for you just in case, even if you know someone personally that owns a printer.

Janro: Well you can show off your work in the Finished Works and Works in Progress board, or here in the General Anim8or board. As you may have noticed I've posted a few topics regarding 3D related projects here in the past. In my opinion, seeing how other Anim8or users are applying CG to their work makes for an interesting read regardless of if it's made in Anim8or or not.

Also, you don't have to do sculpting if you don't want to. Anything modeled traditionally will work just as well as a sculpted model. I just used sculptris because it suited my needs at the moment.

I'm willing to do the conversion work for both ENSONIQ5 and Janro since you guys also won that challenge way back when, if you have a favorite model that you want printed but aren't sure about the work it'll take to prepare it for printing. You two can email it to me and I'll do it for you.

I figured I'd put together something that might interest you guys on how a sliced model looks in the client program that's used to send the instructions to the printer. One of the programs I use has a neat feature that shows what it looks like with all the layers stacked up. It's basically a preview of the real thing, assuming that the print goes smoothly. So if you want to see what it might look like, with what kind of detail, I have no problem with posting a screenshot of your model like this for you to see. The above picture is the original one that I printed with the 0.38mm layer height.

Below is an animation of what the sliced dog looks like, layer-by-layer. The black lines are the lines that the printer will be following while extruding the melted plastic. For this one, the inside fill density has been set at around 0.5, using a pattern that promises good support.

And the picture below is a comparison of 0.2mm(on the left) to 0.38mm(on the right). The one on the right was sliced a few months ago using a less capable slicer, the one on the left was done at the time of this post and took around 15 minutes to slice the model into 357 layers. As you can see the quality is a lot better for the 0.2mm one.

[$imon]

Unfortunately I did not have too much time to make something too detailed. Fortunately it only has to be a model not fully textured etcetera.. so I made this piece. I hope it meets the specifications for printing?

Thanks again Raxx for the amazing offer ! And I hope you will have the printer up and running again soon!

[cooldude234]

Well I drew up my concept image to use as the reference image while modeling, still going to add to it, when I decide what I want to add to it

Since I have march break off (YAY!), I can actually put effort into the quality
(unlike the sloppy concept I drew)

[Raxx]

$imon: Aw, and here I was hoping you'd want to print something like this, or any one of your other challenge entries

Well, your model gave me all sorts of problems, but I got it sliced. Since it's such a large print with not quite as much detail, I might print it at about 0.5mm per layer to save time. Dimensions are approx 168x171x98mm. Sliced at 0.2mm, the estimate was 497 layers, taking 16 hours to print. Sliced at 0.5mm, it's 197 layers at 8 hours. And that's with no infill, so it'll probably take about 2 or 3 times longer than that. Image below of it sliced at 0.5mm:

Let me know if you want to keep this or have a go at a different model!

cooldude234: Looks complicated! Is this a top-down kind of view of the print you're wanting, or are you going to split it up? Good luck with the rest of the design!

[cooldude234]

Well, when its printing, you'd be looking at it, top down in the picture, but its a wall ordainment so it hangs from the wall the same way you are looking at it in the picture.
If my terrible explanation makes sense

[Raxx]

Makes perfect sense, and it's a great idea! Remember the size limitations and such though. With all that detail packed in there, and with it not being any larger than 190mmx170mm, smaller details might disappear or become distorted, especially when flattened.

To show you what I mean, below is an engraving of a bull I found online and sliced. The top image shows what the original depth looks like. For the bottom image, the left side shows the sliced version, the right side is what it looks like as a 3D model. Each row shows it scaled in height (depth) by a certain amount. x1.0 is 13mm, x0.5 is around 6.5mm, and x0.25 is around 3.25mm. Each one has a layer height of 0.2mm, and a width and length of 170mmx170mm.

It doesn't look too bad, but if there are more details squeezed in to a shorter vertical space (flattened), or the layers have to cover more distance in less vertical space, jaggies and loss of detail between the model and the print will start appearing. That's because if the details are shorter than the layer height, that layer isn't going to show it. You can see these jaggies on the top of $imon's sliced tree trunk and on top of my dog's nose and head, and a bit in the picture above.

The loss of detail is evident as well. This concept may seem obvious when you flatten a 3D model, but it's not the same with a 3D print with a limited resolution. You can squint, change the lighting, or zoom in on a flattened 3D model and still see the detail. In a 3D print, no matter how hard you squint, that detail will be lost forever if it's too flat.

I'm not saying your idea can't be done! Far from it, but make sure when you're modeling these details that the details you want to stand out have a minimum height to actually be seen and distinguished in the print. You can also take advantage of the printed flat-detail effect you see in the x0.25 version if that's a style that interests you (takes a little more technical work to achieve, though)

Of course, I'm assuming you're flattening it into a plaque-like form...if it's all going to be fleshed-out, fully 3-dimensional detail (which will work just as well or better), then most of what I just typed doesn't apply. Just more info to soak in I suppose

[cooldude234]

Yea I know what you mean. I was going to make it like a plaque-like thing with 3d depth and detailing. I know that some detail would be lost, which is why when I'm done modeling it I would have it go through your opinion and let me know where are the places that would loose said detail.


PS you said something about limiting the amount of triangles, I'm assuming we are allowed to use triangles though. Would seem quite dumb to not be able to use em.