3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
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Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
I find knoowingbthe basics helps.
I use blender. Its not perfect for 3d modeling. But I knew it a little to start. Also easy to set up on linux.
But honeatly learning its scale odds. (Defaults 1m to mm) boolean modifiers and 3d print tools. (Allow testing for real world models and extra faces.)
Really is all i need to modify stls and make my own sruff.
I find that being able to sketch up things I need in CAD and then print them is both cool and really useful. It's the main reason I bought a printer in the first place. Thus far I've tried out FreeCAD, Solid Edge, and Blender. With any modeling package, you will have to dedicate time on a regular basis to really get used to them. FreeCAD is certainly nice for the fact it's free, just as it implies. I used it to design a few parts that were functional. It works, has some useful workbenches and add-ons. My problems were the software having bugs that caused models to break when trying to make changes, and available training info was often outdated. Siemens offers a free version of Solid Edge to makers, which is really nice, even with some of the advanced features turned off. It's a much more polished program with great training resources. You can only export designs as stl files, but that's fine for 3d printing. Solid Edge will slice and print, but I always import files into Orca and go from there. Blender looks really amazing for modeling, but I admit I haven't spent enough time learning it yet. You can use it to manipulate meshes, which is useful for customizing and fixing models. I've used it to Frankenstein together different models for custom prints I wanted. But yeah, while you don't have to learn to use modeling software to do prints, it opens up so many options for you to be creative. I think it's worth while.
Good old Thingiverse. You'll get a great education in now not to design things for 3D printing wading through that slurry pit.
Yes, consider a 3D printer useless if you don't know how to use 3D modeling software.
May not be a popular opinion, but if you just want to fix shit like that, you can use Microsoft 3D Builder, it's super simple and pretty powerful.
Modifying existing meshes is difficult, especially more complex ones, I find that this makes it much easier to fix dumb shit or make simple modifications.
Oh my God the bastards at Microsoft killed the app!
I had used that before to fix files. It was great.
I can't seem to redownload it without jumping through hoops but know this was the right answer for none coder fixes. Sigh.
@Krauerking my opinion is no. For many things you can find a model on line. Much of the challenge can be getting the printer to work as you wish, so modelling might not be first on the to do list.
i've been dying to try an llm that can generate stls from natural speech